The Vengeance of the Tau (15 page)

“But we’re in Turkey now.”

“Yes. And that explains why it was never found until Hitler sent teams scouring the entire world for mythical artifacts. Several of those teams were responsible for the maps that fell into my father’s possession. But only one of them found what Hitler was most resolutely looking for.”

McCracken climbed back to his feet. “Let’s get going.”

Their flashlights chewed through the darkness to reveal a well-finished corridor with a dirt floor and plenty of headroom. But two hundred yards down from the foot of the deadly stairs, a wall rose up before them to block their path.

“Maybe we took a wrong turn somewhere,” McCracken said.

“Wait a minute,” Melissa said softly.

She moved to the wall on the corridor’s right-hand side, adjacent to its apparent finish. She felt about it with both hands, searching for a switch or trigger similar to the one her father had discovered in the entry chamber.

“Shine your flashlight over here.”

McCracken obliged and watched her rubbing and wiping with a cloth grabbed from her pack. A brush came out next, along with a small precision scraping tool. She gave Blaine her flashlight to hold as well and went to work.

“What is it?” he asked, as the shape of something was being revealed beneath her work.

“Another doorway.”

“Any knob there you plan on cleaning off?”

“There’s writing on this door, instructions for how to open it.”

Her work continued for several more minutes, Blaine powerless to do anything but hold the lights and aim them in the direction she pointed. He saw the shapes and outlines of ancient letters and symbols.

“I’ve got it!” she pronounced triumphantly.

“The missing key?”

“Just as good. The instructions on how to obtain entry are very explicit. See these up here?”

McCracken shone the light in the direction Melissa was pointing to just over her head. He could see
something,
though nothing that made any sense to him.

“I think so,” he said anyway.

“According to what I’m reading, this is the first of five stages. There should be …” Melissa stretched her hand upward, probing about the bulges and finely chiseled shapes. “Yes! Here it is!”

Blaine watched her move what must have been some sort of lever down from the vertical to the horizontal position. It locked with a click. Melissa read on, tracing the ancient instructions with her fingers, wiping and blowing long-collected debris out of her way. This time she placed her palm against what looked like a fist-sized circle on the doorway’s right side. The circle receded behind her push and disappeared into the door.

Melissa traced down and quite a bit to the left, where she needed both her hands to twist a pair of arrows so that their points were crossed. Again the click was distinctive. Another few feet lower she found purchase on the underside of a raised L-shaped fragment and removed it from the wall. Probing farther down the right, she located the slot tailored for it. It slid in as neatly as a key into a lock. Still following the instructions, Melissa turned it.

Click.

“One more to go,” she said, crouching down now as she read on with her fingers and eyes. “This one’s the most complicated. I’ve got to turn two of these symbols—here and here, I think—at the same time. Let’s see …”

Blaine watched her hands feeling for the proper grip.

“That’s got it. Okay, here we—”

McCracken tensed in that instant and threw himself into motion just before the dual clicks sounded together.

“—go.”

He grabbed Melissa by the shoulders and yanked her sideways a millisecond before the huge door rocketed forward. It slammed into the wall directly before it. Fragments blew off and fell to the ground. The entire world seemed to shake. Then the door snapped backward into its slot as quickly as it had shot out.

Melissa clung to Blaine. “How—how did you know?”

“The five stages. There was no reason to be so specific about the amount, unless there was a sixth one only those who knew what to look for could find, after they skipped number five.”

“Down here,” she said, after crouching to better view the lowermost section of the door. “This must be the sixth instruction.”

Melissa read on, tracing the outline of the characters with her fingers. A few times she whisked dust and debris away with her brush to clear the way for her flashlight.

“Simplest of all,” she told Blaine, and twisted a square raised fragment on the door to the left. Instantly the door began to open toward them with a slight grating sound as its bottom rubbed against the ground.

Melissa rose to her feet. A flood of cold, dank air surged outward, enveloping both her and Blaine. She grasped his arm involuntarily. He had his flashlight on and aimed through the widening space.

At last the door stopped moving. McCracken handed Melissa back her flashlight and eased tentatively forward. Their beams swept before them, illuminating shapes in the darkness ahead. Blaine’s eyes narrowed, squinted.

“My God,” Melissa said.

Chapter 14

THE CHAMBER WAS
a massive cavern that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. A huge array of crates, wooden boxes of varying sizes, and steel drums lay directly before Blaine and Melissa. Beyond these were barrels that looked like beer kegs and black ten-gallon cans. Most of the containers were unmarked, but a few had faded writing on them in German. There were also symbols, one predominant, on some of the wooden crates: a swastika.

“The Third Reich,” Blaine said, following Melissa’s eyes to it.

She turned and looked at him. “What is this place?”

“A storage chamber, Melly. The Nazis must have made it farther than you thought and then proceeded to appropriate this chamber for their own use almost a half-century ago.”

“Then all this …”

“Weapons, unless I miss my guess. And I don’t plan on opening any box to find out.”

He had heard all the stories about the undiscovered reserves of the Nazi war machine. Until now, though, he had totally discounted them as paranoid rhetoric. The Nazis had this, the Nazis had that. They were close to developing this, they were close to developing that … Then the war had ended and little of it had ever been found.

Because they had brought much of their stockpile here and left it for safekeeping.

The floor was arranged in the neat precision that any ordnance or records officer would be proud of. No wasted space. Everything had been neatly catalogued and arranged in this cavern to await the rebirth of another Reich.

“All this must have been stored in the war’s waning days by the cadre of officers who had long given up on Hitler,” McCracken explained. “It must have been his maps that directed them here, but they didn’t come looking for hell: they came looking for a place to hide the best of their arsenal.”

McCracken stopped when his flashlight beam illuminated a large vacant area of the floor, the only empty space of that scope in the entire chamber.

“And it looks like part of it is missing,” he continued, as he moved in that direction.

The space in question was thirty feet square. He knelt down and examined the ground.

“Crates of some kind, it looks like. Can’t tell how many or when they were moved.”

Melissa approached him slowly. “You’re saying somebody came down here and removed something the Nazis had stored for their own future use.”

“And whatever it is, we’ve got to figure it’s the pick of the litter,” Blaine added, thinking of all the rumors surrounding the massive unfinished arsenal of the Nazi war machine.

Melissa walked about the perimeter of the vacant area. Several times she knelt to smooth the hard-packed dirt floor with her hand.

“There’s something else,” she said finally. “I think the crates that were stored here were removed in two separate shifts years, even decades, apart. Watch.”

She placed her flashlight on the floor. Its beam cut through the darkness, hugging the ground.

“See,” Melissa said, still kneeling.

“See what?”

Her finger guided his eyes. “Follow the beam and you can tell that the back section of where the crates were has a shallower depression than the front.”

Blaine steadied his eyes. Melissa was right. The difference was slight enough to be almost nonexistent, but it was undeniably there, occupying perhaps a fifth of the total area.

“Shallower,” Melissa continued, “because that set of crates didn’t have nearly as much time to settle as the rest. The others remained here far longer.”

“Until very recently, perhaps?”

“Almost certainly. Why?”

“It fits, that’s all. Whoever dispatched that hit team in San Francisco wanted to make sure no one else found this place, because they must have found it first.”

“We know they didn’t get the missing crates out the way we got in,” Melissa surmised, realizing that their discovery meant there had to be another way out, after all.

“For sure, Melly. But how did they?”

The helicopter hovered over the site of the find. The directions had been precise, and the pilot had had no trouble in locating it. The man in the front section of the American Bell JetRanger turned behind him to the lone passenger in the rear.

“We’re too late,” he said in German into his headset.

Beneath them, the chopper’s floodlight illuminated a depression in the ground, like a sinkhole that had collapsed in on itself.

“Maybe not,” the second man muttered, following his gaze downward.

“What do you mean?”

“The entrance was destroyed by a blast from the inside out.”

“You’re saying he could still be down there? You’re saying he could still be alive?” The man in the rear stole another gaze downward. “Impossible!”

“We know who we are dealing with here.
Anything
is possible.”

“For our sake, for our survival, we must hope so.” He paused. “What do we do now?”

The man in the front twisted his shoulder so he was facing the JetRanger’s rear. “The only thing we can do: keep looking.”

“Blaine,” Melissa called to him, after they had been searching for ten minutes.

“On my way,” he said, the sweep of his flashlight advancing ahead of him.

She was standing not far from the area where the crates had been stored.

“Look at this,” she said, holding something out to him.

“A notebook,” McCracken realized, as he drew closer. “Handwritten in German.”

“Think it has anything to do with our missing crates?”

“Maybe. I found it under some dirt in the same general area. Hasn’t weathered the years well, I’m afraid. Paper’s dried out and warped. Ink’s gone. Not salvageable, least not all of it.”

“What about some?”

“With the proper equipment, it’s possible,” she said, sliding the notebook into her pack. “That is, if we ever find the way out of here.”

“I’ve got faith in you, Melly.”

They moved off again in separate directions to check for hidden openings, doors, or hatchways. The chamber was so large that adequate inspection of the walls could be achieved only from very close up, especially given the limitations of their flashlights. They felt about and tapped the walls, hoping for the telltale hollow sound of a passageway beyond.

The minutes stretched on, with no results. Melissa had abandoned her check of the walls and had moved back toward the area where the crates had been removed from. A pair of tarpaulins partially covered a neat stack of coffin-sized crates, and she pushed against one.

An entire row slid backward behind the pressure.

“Blaine!” she called. “These crates are empty,” she continued when he rushed over. “A facade.”

“To cover a passageway?”

“Let’s find out.”

Melissa joined McCracken in hoisting the empty crates aside. Beneath them the ground resembled the dirt floor covering the rest of the chamber. Melissa bent down and scooped away a portion with her trowel.

“There’s something solid underneath this!” she reported excitedly. “Made of wood, I think!”

Fully exposed, the secret hatch was fifteen feet square, easily large enough to allow all the materials they had found to be raised or lowered through it. McCracken found handholds in all four corners. The hatch didn’t seem to be hinged; it was simply set in place over the opening to be lifted off or pushed upward by a team of workers.

With only himself and Melissa to hoist the hatch, though, the weight of it seemed dead and immobile. They gave up trying to lift and attempted to drag it off instead. The hatch resisted, gave slowly at first, and then receded behind their determined pull. Leaning over the side, both shone their flashlights downward. Dull, dirt-encased steel shimmered slightly back at them from a drop of about twelve feet.

“Some kind of hydraulic platform,” McCracken said to Melissa. “That’s how the Nazis got everything up here.”

“Through a passageway that must originate back at the surface,” she followed hopefully.

McCracken used one of the discarded tarpaulins to lower Melissa down and then rested a steel keg atop the tarp’s edge so he could lower himself after her. At the bottom he had the feeling he was looking upward from his own grave, waiting for the diggers to begin tossing the dirt upon him. The high-ceilinged corridor that led away from the platform was wide and curving.

“Let’s go,” Melissa said, taking the lead.

A hundred feet along, the floor suddenly grew uneven, layered with mounds. The walls and ceiling were lined with fissures and cracks. McCracken drew ahead of Melissa, while she hung back to make a closer inspection.

“This looks like the result of an explosion. Normal wear and tear could never—”

“Wait till you see this,” Blaine interrupted, standing dead still just around the next bank in the corridor.

Melissa drew up even and shone her flashlight ahead. Before them the corridor seemed to have collapsed on itself. The passage was blocked.

“Oh, no,” she muttered.

“And we’ve got company.”

“What?”

“Over there on the right.”

She turned her light that way and saw three long-dead shapes with their backs resting against the remnants of the wall. She moved toward them just behind Blaine. The dead, dry air of this underground chamber had mummified the corpses, which had a thick layer of flesh, like tanned leather, hardened over them. Their clothes draped over their remains in tatters. Bulging teeth and shrunken lips made it seem as though they were smiling. Their eyes were dry-rotted spheres. McCracken knelt down and inspected an old Mauser pistol lying near one of the corpses. Something upon the corpse’s wrist caught his eye, and he shone his flashlight directly against it.