Adrian D'Hage - The Maya codex

‘No! I will handle that myself,’ von Hei?en declared, determined there would be no blemish on his record. He would use his contacts in the Gestapo to seal off any escape route through Vienna or Istanbul.

‘Do you want to cancel the experiment with the Weizman Jewess?’ Brandt asked. ‘Doktor Richtoff is ready to start.’

‘Tell Doktor Richtoff to go ahead. I will be there shortly. We’ll make other arrangements for the two brats… very special arrangements.’

‘Jawohl, Herr Kommandant!’

In less than two minutes, von Hei?en was through to Adolf Eichmann in Vienna, providing him with the registration number of the van.

‘Kein Problem, mein Freund. The borders are sealed and if they’re attempting to get them out through the docks, we’ll intercept them.’

‘ Danke, Adolf. Much appreciated.’ Von Hei?en hung up the phone, satisfied the Weizman children would soon be back behind Mauthausen’s walls.

Ramona lay naked on a stainless-steel gurney outside the pressure chamber. She shivered violently in the cold, unable to move. Black metal cuffs bit into her ankles and wrists, and behind her a series of leads attached to her body were connected to a machine. Fear for her children tore at her very being.

‘As soon as you’ve recorded its temperature and blood pressure, have it placed in the chamber,’ Doctor Richtoff ordered his assistant, a lanky pale-faced medical student in his early twenties.

‘ Jawohl, Herr Doktor. ’

Von Hei?en, together with Hauptsturmfuhrer Brandt, stood at one of the observation windows. Two orderlies wheeled the gurney into the chamber and Brandt ran his eyes over Ramona’s naked form. For a woman in her forties, she was in good condition, he thought. The doctor joined them in the observation booth. ‘How long do you think she’ll last, Doktor?’ he asked.

Richtoff shrugged his shoulders. ‘Hard to tell. This one looks pretty fit, but unfortunately we don’t have much data on females, so we’ll have to wait and see.’ Richtoff picked up a small microphone at the side of the observation window.

‘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 Gokoglan, reached for a frayed cord just above his head. Three mournful blasts reverberated through the mist surrounding the docks. Gokoglan 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. Gokoglan 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. Gokoglan 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.’

Hauptsturmfuhrer 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 Hei?en 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.’

Hauptsturmfuhrer 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…