The Project (24 page)

Luke sucked in a chestful of horrible, bitter air, filled with
acrid smoke and cordite, but it tasted better than the purest mountain air. Then he spat the object out of his mouth and onto the ground. It was the cork. Or rather, half the cork.

Tommy!

Was he alive or dead?

Luke forced himself to roll over onto his stomach and pressed upward with his arms.

He could see the crushed shape of the motorcycle ahead and crawled toward it, ignoring the pain in his legs and ribs. He squeezed between the edge of the ditch and the bike and found Tommy, half in and half out of the sidecar. He’d somehow stayed in it as it was blasted off the road.

Tommy’s face was covered in blood and mud, and his clothing was torn and blackened. Blood was flowing out of a wound on his scalp, and Luke feared he was dead, but as he touched Tommy’s leg, he opened his eyes.

“Dude, you look awful,” Tommy said.

There was another string of explosions, and although they sounded farther away, Luke pressed himself to the bottom of the ditch, realizing that it was probably this ditch that had saved their lives as the mountainside had been ripped apart around them.

Then there was silence.

Utter silence.

The bombing had stopped.

No birds chirped in the trees, and no wind whispered around the mountainside. Nothing dared disturb this eerie calmness.

“I think it’s over,” Luke said. “Can you walk?”

“Yes.” Tommy nodded. “But can you?”

Luke looked down to see his right kneesock was no longer white but bright red. He pulled himself to his feet, using the remains of the bike for leverage, and carefully put weight on his leg.

It hurt like hell, but it held his weight. It wasn’t broken at least.

“I can walk,” Luke said, but Tommy wasn’t listening. He was looking back down the hillside toward the intersection and the road to Berchtesgaden.

“But can you run?” Tommy asked.

Luke followed his gaze and saw Mueller and Mumbo emerge through swirling clouds of smoke, automatic weapons in their arms.

T
ommy rolled up and out of the far side of the ditch and reached back down for Luke.

“Run!” Luke shouted at him. “Get back to the bunker.”

“Get a grip, dude,” Tommy said. He grabbed Luke’s arm and hauled him up out of the ditch.

Mueller lifted his gun, and bullets smacked into the trunks of the trees behind them.

“Come on!” Tommy yelled, putting one of Luke’s arms around his shoulders.

As Luke ran, he thought it was amazing what the human body could do when there was a madman with a machine gun behind you.

They staggered, stumbled, and lurched into the small forest behind them. When they had seen it that morning, it had been a proud stand of fir trees, tall with a fine head of snow. Now the snow was gone, shaken from the branches by the pounding of the explosions. So were many of the trees,
grotesquely twisted and distorted into a maze of splintered wood.

Smoke swirled through the small forest, making ghastly, ghostly shapes of the maimed trees. White smoke and dirty gray smoke intermingled in strange scything patterns.

But there were no colors in this landscape; everything was burned black or ash white or smoky shades of gray.

Mueller and Mumbo disappeared, but Luke knew they were not far away.

“Not in a straight line,” Luke whispered.

They zigzagged a random course through the forest, but always uphill, knowing that sooner or later that would take them to the hotel. As they moved, they listened for any sound that might help them locate Mueller and Mumbo, while at the same time trying to make as little sound themselves as possible.

What about Jumbo? Luke wondered. Was he also somewhere in the misty smoke, hunting for them? Or was he lying injured in the remains of the car?

The clouds of smoke, dust, and pulverized concrete drifted and swirled, sometimes smothering them in a thick blanket and other times clearing almost to nothing. The smoke crept into their nostrils and mouths, tasting like a spoonful of hot ash.

A crumpled, twisted mess of timber and masonry appeared out of nowhere in one of the strange hollows in the clouds. Only the fancy terrace on the far side allowed him to recognize it as the ruins of the Berghof. The fuming
wreckage of Hitler’s holiday home was perhaps a symbol of what lay in store for his empire, his Third Reich.

They skirted around a huge bomb crater rimmed with the splintered skeletons of trees, and emerged into a natural clearing.

In the center, motionless, stood a fawn. It watched them approach, blinking, but didn’t run.

As they passed it, Luke reached out a hand and ran it along the back of the creature, feeling the fine fur rub like velvet against his fingers. The fawn did not flinch.

A burst of machine-gun fire sounded as they got to the trees at the far side of the clearing, Mueller or Mumbo shooting at shadows. Luke glanced back at the fawn, but it remained motionless, a statue. He watched it until it disappeared from sight.

Tommy stopped suddenly and put a hand over Luke’s mouth.

Mueller and Mumbo appeared from behind a crisscross of fallen trees in front of them, heading uphill.

Mumbo started to turn, to look back at them, but just as he did, a cloud of smoke and dust grasped him in swirling gray fingers and he faded from sight, despite being only a few yards away.

Luke and Tommy struck out at a right angle, trying to put distance between them. They were not far from the hotel now, and he strove to move faster, to be less of a burden to Tommy. Tommy was uncomplaining. Taking half of Luke’s weight, he strode forward tirelessly.

They almost stumbled over Hitler’s toilet. It had landed
upright, wedged between a tree and a fallen trunk. It was cracked but otherwise intact.

The seat was up and Luke thought, a little insanely, that his mother would not approve of that.
You might as well spray crap all around the room
.

They neared the top of the road, and still he could not see the hotel. Then he realized they were looking at it. Half of it, anyway. The other half was gone. Another direct hit.

The Allies had pasted this area, obliterating the holiday resort of the hated Nazis, and he cheered them for it, even as he cursed them for it.

They stumbled to the hotel and picked a way inside, over broken timber and furniture that had been tossed around the front room.

There was another loud burst of machine-gun fire behind them. Plaster flew in puffs from the walls, and a mirror on the far wall, somehow still intact, shattered and fell.

They ducked and Luke looked back to see Mueller and Mumbo closing in on the hotel.

“Hurry,” Tommy said.

Mumbo fired again as they stumbled deeper into the ruin. The staircase down to the bunker was undamaged, and they pretty much fell down it, dragging themselves back to their feet at the bottom.

The large metal door that led into the complex was shut, and when Luke tried the handle, he found it was locked.

Above they could hear Mueller and Mumbo moving through the rubble on the first floor.

Tommy banged desperately on the door, and to Luke’s amazement, there was a click, and it opened an inch.

An eye peered out, but when it saw two boys, bruised, battered, in ragged Hitler Youth uniforms, the door sprung open.

The man at the door was a tall SS officer with a black patch over one eye and a jagged scar that ran from his ear to his chin. He moved aside to let them in.

A few more SS men were in the corridor, all armed with pistols or automatic weapons. Other eyes watched them from the doorways that lined the corridor.

There were footsteps on the stairs behind them.

Luke, still leaning on Tommy’s shoulder, put his mouth to Tommy’s ear and whispered, “American soldiers.”

Tommy caught on at once.
“Amerikanische Soldaten!”
he shouted, pointing behind them at the stairs.
“Amerikanische Soldaten!”

Luke couldn’t imagine what American soldiers would be doing advancing through Obersalzberg in the middle of an air raid, but it was enough to panic the SS troops.

The first man slammed the big metal door and flicked shut the catches on all four corners. Luke and Tommy were bustled away from the entrance, and the SS took defensive positions in the corridor, training their weapons on the door. From the nursing station, a woman beckoned to Luke and Tommy, but they didn’t have time for that. Luke shook his head and gestured down the corridor as if they had somewhere they needed to be.

Which they did.

They heard a banging on the door behind them and shouts muffled by the metal.

The SS troops would be suspicious, suspecting a trick by the “American soldiers” outside, but it wouldn’t take Mueller long to convince them.

They walked as quickly as they could past the dim doorways and the frightened eyes that peered out from each room, trying not to look like they were running.

Inside the bunker, the going was easier, flatter.

“I’m okay,” Luke said to Tommy. “I can walk.”

“You sure?” Tommy asked.

“Sweet as.” Luke forced a quick grin.

Tommy took Luke’s arm from around his shoulders but still supported him with a strong grip on his upper arm.

A teenager, about their age, stepped into the corridor in front of them. He looked terrified, his mouth gaping.

Luke instantly recognized the protruding nose and jaw, the high, animal-like ears. It was young Erich Mueller.

Here was their enemy, just a frightened boy, watching the world he knew slowly come to an end.

“Was ist los?”
he asked.
“Was ist los?”

“Amerikanische Soldaten!”
Luke said, mimicking Tommy.

Mueller’s eyes opened wide in horror, and he disappeared back into his room. Luke stared after him for a second, dumbfounded by the exchange, by the strange twist in time that had him feeling sorry for the child who would grow up to be the man who was currently trying to kill him.

Then Tommy hauled him forward again.

Nobody stopped them. Nobody questioned them.

But the banging on the door behind them stopped, and he suspected that Mueller had managed to talk his way inside.

The corridor into the Werewolf lair was deserted, and they broke into a lurching run, turning off the linking tunnel into the main corridor. Gunfire rattled behind them, and bullets ricocheted off the concrete walls and floor of the tunnel.

“Go,” Luke said, and pushed Tommy into the tunnel in front of him. “I’m okay.”

They ran a few yards, and Luke could see the odd oval door that led down to the cave of the Vitruvian chamber. Suddenly there was a metallic scraping sound from behind them.

He looked back to see a strange tin can with a long wooden handle bouncing along the floor of the tunnel.

“Grenade!” he shouted. He dived to the side, pushing Tommy through a side door.

The explosion, in the confined space of the tunnel, was ear-shattering, and Luke saw, rather than heard, Tommy mouth the words
Go, go!
as he dragged Luke back to his feet and pushed him through the smoke and smell of cordite, down the corridor.

Then the huge metal door to the lower staircase was in front of them. The handle that had seemed so heavy in the future spun like a feather in their adrenaline-fueled hands.

They slammed the door shut behind them and braced it with a solid length of timber that fitted into two brackets on either side of the door.

Almost immediately, there was a hammering on the other side of the door, but they ignored it and hurried down the long staircase to the cave.

They had reached the bottom and were hauling the second door open when there came another shattering blast from above, and shards of concrete and rock rained down on them from the top of the stairs.

Luke looked up to see the metal door hanging uselessly, limply open, smoke and dust swirling around it.

“Go, go, go!” he yelled, diving through the door after Tommy. He kicked it shut behind him and jammed home the latch just as the thump of an explosion sounded on the other side. Dust billowed around the edges of the door, but it held firmly.

There was a light switch by the door, and he flicked it on, filling the corners of the deep cave with a harsh glare.

The foundations of the metal wall lay in front of them. To the sides were the piles of timber, wire, and boxes of nuts and bolts they had seen earlier. Some empty crates were stacked against the cave wall.

“Come on!” Tommy yelled.

“No! Wait!” Luke shouted. He shuffled over to the wooden crane, holding on to one of the legs for support.

“What?”

Luke tried to calm his breathing and think clearly through the pain from his ribs and leg. “We have to destroy the chamber,” he said.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Tommy said. “Cut some ropes, trap them in 1944.”

“That’s not enough,” Luke said. “We have to destroy it and make sure nobody ever uses it again.”

Another explosion sounded behind the metal door, and
more dust blew from around the edges, but it held.

“Let’s get back home,” Tommy pleaded. “We’ll find some explosives and blow the chamber up.”

“Where exactly are you going to find explosives?” Luke asked. “And would you know what to do with them if you found them?”

“What, then?”

Luke looked around the cave, and his eyes fell on one of the caches of building materials. “All we need,” he said, “is a few nuts and bolts and a bit of wire.”

Working through the fear and the pain, they dragged one of the wooden crates of metal bolts beneath the crane. They fed the chain through the carry-handles, then hoisted the crate up as high as it would go.

The crane was on wheels, but there was a locking lever and they had to release each wheel individually before it would move.

There were no more explosions from the metal door, but it shook with a steady hammering.

Luke and Tommy pushed the tall frame of the crane to the center of the cave, using the white chalk cross as a marker.

“I hope this works,” Tommy said.