The Maya Codex (18 page)

‘Ready ?’

‘
Ja, Herr Doktor
,’ his assistant answered, his reply strangely muffled by the intercom. ‘Temperature 99.9. Blood pressure 160 over 115 and heart rate 110.’

‘So,’ Richtoff observed, ‘the specimen is running a fever and the blood pressure and heart rate are up. This may not take long, but we’ll see.’ He pressed a red button and a purple light started to flash above the steel door of the pressure chamber. The two orderlies and Richtoff’s assistant evacuated the chamber, and one of them spun a silver-spoked wheel, sealing the chamber bulkhead.

‘Achtung! Achtung! Wir beginnen!’

The Turkish captain of the coal carrier
Wilhelm Kohler,
Mustafa Gökoğlan, reached for a frayed cord just above his head. Three mournful blasts reverberated through the mist surrounding the docks. Gökoğlan looked out of his wheelhouse and waved the gangplank and mooring ropes away. He’d been reluctant to take on the human cargo, but he understood the language of money. Now that the twenty-one Jewish children were crammed into four cabins below decks, he was impatient to get away. The rest of his cargo manifest wouldn’t stand too much scrutiny by the authorities either, and he was wary of the German soldiers on the docks. He leaned out of the wheelhouse. ‘Let go for’ard!’ The dockworker loosened the heavy hawser from its bollard. Gökoğlan took a sip from a battered mug of steaming coffee, grasped the smooth, brass handle of the telegraph and rang for ‘slow ahead’. ‘Let go aft!’

Three decks below, the
Wilhelm Kohler
’s wiry little engineer, a Kurd by the name of Hozan Barzani, wiped his dark brow with some oily cotton waste and reached for the old silver throttle wheel. He opened it gently and steam hissed into the Penn and Company triple-expansion steam engine. Barzani opened it a little further and more high-pressure steam shot into the first and smallest of the old cylinders, expanding into a second and then a third, each piston larger than the first to adjust for the progressive loss of pressure. The old engine towered over Hozan, and the worn big-end bearings on the one-metre-long connecting rods protested as the great pistons slowly gathered momentum.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Barzani swore in Kurdish. He’d been arguing with his obstinate captain for months, but to no avail. Not only were the con-rod bearings worn, but the bearings that held the drive shaft in place were dangerously overdue for maintenance and the lubricating oil was leaking badly, causing the bearings to overheat. Sailing the great river was not without its dangers, especially at night, but Barzani had been told that once they left the Romanian delta, they would cross the Black Sea and enter the Bosphorus Strait: fourteen nautical miles of twisting, turning waterway where thick fog could reduce visibility to a few hundred metres; where ships coming in the opposite direction were obscured by sharp turns. In places the straits were only a few hundred metres wide. When they reached Istanbul, ferries and other small craft would add to the hazards. From there Barzani had been told they were sailing for Palestine.

‘Your father’s a dog!’ he swore, shaking his fist at the rusted deck above his head. It was madness.

Clouds of black smoke belched from the
Wilhelm Kohler
’s funnel, and the old tramp steamer moved away from the dockside and out into the Danube. Gökoğlan sipped his coffee, oblivious both to the insults being hurled at him from below decks and the sirens gathering in the distance.

The dark, dank cabin to the aft of the steamer smelled of rotting canvas and fuel oil. As the deck vibrated beneath her feet, Rebekkah felt as if she might be sick, and she reached for her brother’s hand.

‘I’m scared, Ariel.’

‘We’ll be all right, Rebekkah … I promise.’

Hauptsturmführer Brandt peered through the observation window at the pressure chamber. The specimen appeared to be crying, but other than that, it was all fairly boring. ‘Not much happening, Doktor?’ the young SS captain remarked, a note of disappointment in his voice.

Richtoff grunted. ‘There won’t be for a while. First we have to reduce the temperature to zero degrees centigrade and pressure to one atmosphere – what we call standard temperature and pressure, which replicates sea level. Under those conditions, our specimen would still take quite a while to die from the cold, but the pressure is dropping now, simulating altitude.’ A large red needle on the pressure gauge started to quiver and slowly wound back over the black gradations that marked the millimetres of mercury.

Von Heißen watched the needle on the temperature gauge plunge past zero. He was still seething over the children’s escape, but his connections with Himmler were well known in the Reich and he was confident the Gestapo would soon recapture the escapees. The borders were sealed and the docks in Vienna would be thoroughly checked, as would the shipping schedules and arrivals in Istanbul.

Ramona stared uncomprehendingly through her tears at the frost forming on the large pipes above her head, and she shivered violently on the bare steel gurney. Her head ached and every so often a razored needle seemed to pierce her wrists. Death would be a merciful escape, but she knew she had to hold on. The children were without their father now and they would need her; but it was becoming more difficult to breathe and she could feel her pulse quickening. Another bolt of pain burst through her brain and she gritted her teeth.

‘Twenty thousand feet,’ Richtoff observed. ‘This one is tougher than I thought.’

Hauptsturmführer Brandt nodded, his eyes riveted on the barometric pressure gauge. The experiment had been running for nearly twenty minutes and the red needle was falling more steadily now. The height equivalents were clearly marked in feet: 20 000 … 21 000 … 22 000 …

‘It’s twitching,’ Brandt observed as the falling pressure simulated 23 000 feet.

‘
Much
tougher than I thought,’ Richtoff observed. ‘Pulse is now 180. It’s amazing how hard the heart can work before it collapses. See how its head wiggles. Even at this temperature it’s perspiring.’

Ramona fought desperately for breath as violent cramps racked her body. ‘My children. My children,’ she gasped.

‘I think it’s finally unconscious,’ Richtoff remarked casually. ‘The breathing is slowing dramatically.’

‘And there’s frothing at the mouth,’ Hauptsturmführer Brandt observed excitedly.

Richtoff turned to his assistant. ‘Make a note of severe cyanosis.’ The circulation of de-oxygenated blood had turned Ramona’s face a deep blue.

‘And now the breathing has stopped,’ Richtoff observed. Five minutes later he turned to von Heißen. ‘It’s dead, but quite an amazing specimen. Nearly 25 000 feet … I can’t recall one lasting for so long at that altitude, let alone a female. The autopsy will hopefully provide us with some more data.’

‘Good. Let Hans here know if there’s anything else you need.’ Von Heißen headed back to his office where two immediate cables were waiting for him. The first was from Alberto Felici, indicating that he would shortly be travelling to Istanbul on Vatican business. The second was from Adolf Eichmann, indicating the Weizman children were believed to be on a tramp steamer bound for the Bosphorus, and giving him authority to liaise directly with the German Defence Attaché in Istanbul.

Von Heißen buzzed for his adjutant. This time there must be no mistake, he mused, vowing to see to it personally.

‘
Herr Kommandant?
’

‘Make arrangements for me to leave for Istanbul on the first flight out of Vienna tomorrow, and get this cable off to the Vatican,’ he commanded, handing Brandt his reply to Felici, suggesting they meet at the Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul.

18

THE
WILHELM KOHLER

H
ungry, cold and traumatised, Ariel and Rebekkah huddled underneath the
Wilhelm Kohler
’s wheelhouse. Further aft, some of the other children had sought shelter in the lee of the starboard wing. The rusty deck beneath their feet vibrated to the steady
thump-thump-thump
of the coal-steamer’s engine. The rain sheeted in from the south across the Black Sea, but the cold air was far preferable to the fumes of the cabin. From the pocket where he kept his father’s maps, Ariel carefully extracted a dry biscuit he’d saved from breakfast and broke it in two. As he passed half to Rebekkah, shouting broke out on the bridge above them.

‘For three months I’ve been telling you the main bearings are too hot! Always you want full speed, but if you keep it up, they will seize!’ Barzani’s black eyes blazed with anger. It was a battle that was as old as the steam engine itself. For Barzani, the overheated bearings spelled disaster. For the stubborn old Turk on the bridge, any slackening in the ship’s speed meant a bad-tempered owner and no bonus.

‘I’m the captain of this ship, mister, and you’ll follow orders. Maintain full revolutions!’

Barzani stormed off the bridge, his dirty overalls unbuttoned to his waist, sweat running down his dark, hairy chest.

‘Son of a bitch,’ he muttered as he clambered down the engine-room companionway. The thumping pistons, hissing steam and roar of the furnace were deafening, but amongst the cacophony, he sensed another noise. Like a great orchestral conductor detecting that an oboe was flat by a fraction of a tone, in amongst the thunderous cranking of the
Wilhelm Kohler
’s machinery, the engineer had picked up a slight knocking. Aft of the great engine, a single gleaming drive shaft ran the length of the keel, encased by semicircular bearing caps the size of a small car. Barzani checked the blackened steam gauges above the furnace and reached for his battered oilcan. He headed aft, stooping to fit through the cramped bulkheads that enclosed the pulsing drive shaft. He reached the first of the massive bearing caps and felt it. It was hot – far too hot. Barzani injected just the right amount of oil into the filler cup on top of the thumping case. He stopped to shake his fist at the deck above him. ‘
Pic!
Bastard!’ he swore, and he headed along the shaft towards the next bearing.

The
Wilhelm Kohler
reached the entrance to the Bosphorus late in the afternoon. The Strait of Istanbul, Mustafa Gökoğlan knew, was one of the most dangerous waterways in the world. Sixteen headlands had to be negotiated along the seventeen nautical miles, and a surface current ran south from the Black Sea to the Marmara; but because of the different salt concentrations between the two seas, a second, deeper current ran in the opposite direction. Gökoğlan alternately puffed on his pipe and sipped from coffee laced with raki, the powerful white spirit the Turks called
aslant sütü
, lion’s milk.

‘See, Ariel: a fishing village,’ Rebekkah said, pointing to their first sight of land since they’d left the Danube. The
Wilhelm Kohler
was less than 300 metres from the shoreline. Small, brightly coloured wooden fishing boats rocked in front of the fish market at Rumeli Kavagi. The rain had eased, and on the ridgeline behind the market, they could see houses beneath the plane trees. Further along, the ridgeline was dominated by a huge castle. The fishing villages on the European side gradually gave way to turreted wooden mansions; while on the Asian shore opposite, one of the former Sultans’ many summer palaces commanded the top of a steep hill.