William Dietrich - Blood of the Reich

“Couldn’t you warn me?” His eyes were watering, it hurt so bad.

“That would have made it worse.” She inspected her dressing. “We’ve got to get the bleeding to stop or you might faint.”

He sat down hard against the pipes. “That might happen anyway. I’ve had quite a day.” He couldn’t quite believe where he was. Probably the greatest discovery in his museum’s history, and he’d just deliberately caused a cave-in. Roy Chapman Andrews would have shot his way out by now.

She knelt beside him. “Me, too.” She picked up the severed finger. “I may use this for a blood lock.”

“A what?”

“The locks of this place, like to the door of that main tunnel, can be opened only by the right person’s blood. Raeder said he had the necessary blood from a long-dead German hero.”

“That makes no sense.”

“He thinks the Germans and Shambhalans are cousins. Aryans.”

Hood laid his head back. “And to think he and I were partners, once. Scientific colleagues. I sure know how to pick ’em.”

“He’s still embarrassed you fired him. Ashamed of what he is, but unable to change.” Keyuri looked at him, her own cheeks wet now with tears. “I’m sorry I had to do that to your hand. I’m sorry destiny made you come back here.” She leaned and kissed him again. “I’m sorry you picked me, not just Kurt. But we were meant to be together again, Benjamin.”

Despite the pain he kissed back, the communion an instinctual antidote to everything that was going on. Her lips were full, ripe, soft, everything that was opposite the machine nightmare that was Shambhala. Pressing against her seemed to lessen the pain, and then she was pressing against him, and he groaned with sudden lust and longing.

He broke from their kiss, panting. “Keyuri, I’m sorry, I can’t help myself, I know you’ve taken vows…”

“You must have me now.” Her voice was commanding, insistent. “I think we may die in here, and I want you to make love first.”

“For God’s sake, we’re in a cave running from a lunatic.”

“The tunnel is sealed. Now, Ben, it’s important! I want to erase the memory of Raeder. Now, now, please!” She was crying. “Please, to undo what he did to me.”

She was clawing at his clothes, unbuttoning his pants, and to his own surprise he was responding. What was wrong with him? She was a Buddhist nun! This was as crazy as the Nazis, but of course he didn’t care. She pulled him down on top of her, her robes pulled up, knees high, hips lifted, and in seconds they’d fused. She clung and rocked urgently. “Please, we may never have time again.”

She was impatient. A few thrusts, she bucked, he finished.

“I’m sorry, you took me by surprise…”

She put her finger to his lips. Rather than be displeased with his speed she seemed fiercely satisfied, pulling him as deep as she could, hips quivering as she gently rocked. “It’s good.”

At least he’d forgotten about his hand.

Keyuri let out a loud, shuddering breath, squeezing her eyes shut. Then she reached up to pull him close again and kissed, fiercely, and then just as abruptly pushed him off her. “We must go, but this was my only chance for salvation.”

“That’s some salvation.” He looked at her in wonder. “What about your vows?”

“He already raped me again.”

“Raeder? Did the other krauts know?”

“Yes and no. I don’t know. What does it matter?” There was sorrow there, a profound sense of loss and doom. “I just didn’t want him to be my last. Now, tend to your clothes. We have to hurry to find the second door.”

“I thought you said you sealed the Germans off? Seems to me we have eternity.” He looked down the tunnel into the dark.

“To Westerners, everything is a line. To us, all is circular. Look down the tunnel. How far can you see?”

“It’s dim…”

“The pipe doesn’t extend forever, it disappears, like a ship going over the horizon. This tunnel gently curves.”

“What does that mean?”

“The tunnel is a circle. If you walk far enough from this end of the machine you will come to the other, like walking around the world. The beginning is the end, and the end the beginning. These pipes stretch to infinity, they never end. And yet they go nowhere at all.”

“Is that some kind of Tibetan riddle?”

“Whatever is in these pipes, it’s meant to come back to where it started,” she said. “That’s not a riddle, it’s a mandala, a map of the universe.”

He stood. “But if this tunnel leads back to the machine…”

“Yes. They can come at us from the other end. We have to hope it will take them a while to figure that out.”

“Maybe they’ve given up. And we’ve got this crazy staff.”

“Raeder would give you up. Even give me up. But not the staff.”

Hood took a breath, furious at Raeder for Keyuri all over again, but also oddly renewed. She hadn’t depleted him, she’d tapped new strength. She’d recharged him, like the machine apparently had done to the magic wand here. By blazes, was she in love with him still? Was he in love with her, as Reting and Beth believed? What happened to the three of them if they got out of this nightmare?

But Keyuri, he sensed, didn’t expect to.

“Okay,” he said. “Listen for Nazis coming the other way. The light from this staff keeps getting weaker, and I’ve got a feeling there’s not much pop left. I think it’s low on ammo. Give me back my pistol.”

“You can’t carry it in your injured hand and I told you, it doesn’t work.”

He grimaced. “We need to find that second door. Then we can destroy the tunnel in the other direction and escape.”

The rock tunnel they were fleeing down had no decoration on its sides, and no doors. It just ran on and on, mile after mile, a tube in solid rock. The pipes were mute beside it. They ran, then jogged, then trotted, wheezing from exertion. Mile followed mile. Hood left bright drops of blood on the floor like a spoor trail.

“How long is this tunnel?”

“Not long enough,” said Keyuri.

And then there was a burst of machine-gun fire.

Bullets whined and pinged as they bounced down the curving tunnel. It was a German coming from the other side. They were trapped.

Hood clenched the staff. “Better to go down fighting,” he said. “I can try to blast with this, or maybe hide in the dark behind the big pipe and clobber them. You’ve got your knife… Keyuri?”

He turned. She’d fallen down.

“Keyuri!”

Blood was pooling out beneath her onto the smooth rock floor.

One of the Germans, not Raeder, shouted. “Give it up, Hood! I have a machine gun! Surrender the staff and I let you live!”

The Nazi wasn’t coming close, however. He’d seen the explosion at the other end of the tunnel and was keeping a wary distance.

Hood knelt near the nun and gently turned her over. The front of her coat was sticky with blood and she was wheezing. It looked like she’d been hit in the lower lung. Not instantly fatal, but not good.

“Keyuri, I’m going to drag you between the pipes and the far wall. At least it will protect you from a stray bullet.”

She moaned. “Maybe he’ll go past us,” she whispered.

“No, he’ll see the light of the staff. How do we turn it off?”

“I don’t know.”

The beam of a flashlight stabbed toward them. The German kept a cautious fifty yards away, too far for accurate submachine-gun fire but also far enough to be out of easy range of their thunder stick.

“Hood, I know you’re there! Come out with your hands up if you want to live!” he called in English. “Come out, and we spare the nun!”

He and Keyuri stayed silent, hiding behind a pipe.