David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘What about these people?’ Stein said, gesturing back. ‘I mean those who recover, physically?’

Cameron started to say something, then stopped. He took a deep breath. His voice was quavering. ‘Yesterday, just after we arrived, one of the British officers gave his revolver to an inmate, to shoot one of the guards. The man immediately shot himself. He’d been talking about his little son, asking for him, a child taken from him at the Auschwitz railhead to be gassed. The man knew what had happened, he had seen it with his own eyes, but had been unable to comprehend it. That’s the true horror. The horror of what happens when they start to remember. It’s as if they wake up from a ghastly nightmare, but then realize it was real. I don’t know what good I’m doing here. If we nurse them back to physical health and they can’t live with it, how can that be right?’

They watched as Cameron hurried away, his form framed by the pastel wasteland behind him, the sun’s rays diffused by the opaque miasma above. Then they turned towards the forest. They passed the bloated body of a German officer, his uniform torn open, his boots gone. He was Luftwaffe, air force, not SS. He must have been the officer who had shot at Hugh’s men. Mayne remembered what Cameron had said about SS guards having escaped into the woods, about marauding inmates searching for them, living wild. He undid the flap of his holster. Stein saw him do it, and removed his own Colt automatic pistol. He clicked out the magazine, checked that it was full, slammed it back in again and pulled back the slide, seeing that a round was chambered. Mayne watched him, saying nothing, and they both moved forward cautiously along the dirt track under the trees. The pines along the edge gave way to old-growth deciduous forest, with huge oaks forming a canopy that would have concealed the track from aerial reconnaissance. ‘The RAF photos show about three kilometres of dense wood in this direction,’ Stein murmured. ‘If the bunker’s concealed in the middle, we’re looking for something twenty minutes’ walk, maybe half an hour ahead.’

‘Are you comfortable with this?’ Mayne said. ‘We could wait for reinforcements.’

‘No. Now or never. I have a gut feeling about this. There could be more at stake here than lost treasures. Much more.’

‘And you should know we’re both here on the same ticket. My unit, 30 AU, are more than just a tactical recon outfit. I hadn’t heard about the interrogation of the Nazi official you mentioned, but my colonel at Corps HQ took me straight off our planned op and put me on this one as soon as that drawing appeared. That’s why we were rushed out here without the usual back-up. And our job isn’t just to prevent material falling into the hands of the wrong people. It’s to prevent this war ending the way Hitler wants it to. ’

‘Okay. We do this as a team. Clean slate from now on?’

‘Agreed.’ Mayne raised his revolver and edged forward. ‘Let’s do it.’

M ayne and Stein walked forward in an uneasy silence, one on either side of the bridleway, occasionally raising their arms high to avoid patches of stinging nettles. Mayne kept his revolver cocked and at the ready. Suddenly there was a commotion and a woman lurched out of the undergrowth in front of them. He aimed his revolver and kept it trained on her. She staggered about, and then stood a few yards away from them, swaying. Her hair had been tied back in a bun, but was dishevelled, and her face was scratched and bruised. She wore an overcoat, muddied but decent, and she was stout, well-fed. She was clearly not one of the inmates.

She lurched closer, staring around as if she were being hunted, then peered hard at Mayne, looking at the unit flashes on his battledress, at the crown of his rank on his shoulder lapels. She had little piggy eyes. She smiled to herself, muttering feverishly. ‘You are Englisher, ja?’ She spoke with a heavy accent. Mayne nodded, keeping the pistol trained on her. She clapped her hands, her face beaming, and came closer, grabbing his arm. Her breath smelled like food, like meat, a foul smell in this place, obscene. He shook her off and pushed her roughly back. She came at him again. ‘English officer? Thank Gott you have come. You will rescue me from this filth, these Juden. I know what you English really think. You don’t believe me? Look. I am not one of them.’ She peered furtively around and then shrugged off the overcoat. Underneath she was wearing the tunic of the SS-Totenkopfverbande. She had been a camp guard. Mayne suddenly remembered. The Lagerfuhrerin, the hated camp leader. The one who had escaped into the forest. The one who had taken the girl. She thrust her lapels towards him, showing the death’s-head insignia, then stood back and held her hands out, as if to rest her case. She grinned insanely, gesturing at Stein as well. ‘ Ja? Ja? ’

Mayne raised the Webley, aimed at her stomach and fired. She lurched backwards and then fell forward on her knees, a look of shock on her face. A gob of blood spurted out of her mouth and she made a terrible gurgling sound. He raised the revolver again and shot her in the head. She snapped back, her knees contorted. The bullet had blown the top of her head off, and fragments of bone and brain spattered the ground. Blood pumped out of the wound in a gush, and then stopped. She lay still, with one eye open and the other half shut. The sound of the shots had been a dull thud, not a crack, as if the trees and the weight of this place had dampened the report. Mayne broke open the revolver, extracted the two spent cartridges and replaced them with new ones he took from his webbing pouch. He snapped the revolver shut, then glanced at the body. ‘Funny. That’s the first blood I’ve seen in this place.’

Stein stared hard at the corpse, then looked at Mayne. ‘I’m Jewish, you know.’

‘I guessed it. Your name.’

They continued walking up the track. The trees were now bigger and the canopy denser, obscuring the sunlight. The thick scrub on either side of the track near the forest entrance gave way to large trees, their lower branches dead and leafless, allowing them to see into the gloom on either side. Regular rows of pines from an old plantation were bisected by the path. As they passed each row it was as if they were parting veil after veil, compressing the view ahead, making them look sideways down the tunnels between the trees where the perspective seemed clearer. It was a curious trick of the mind, disconcerting. There was no sign of any more people, but Mayne knew there were others out there. He wished he could hear better, wished his body was less damaged. In past wars he would have been dead by now, a warrior who had done his deeds on the battlefield and could die with honour. He felt as if he were on borrowed time, and those words, glory, honour, had a hollow ring to them, only meaningful in brief snatches of daydream when he remembered an innocent version of himself before the war, before he knew what Homer had really meant, what heroes really did.

The image of the woman he had just shot flashed before him, grotesque, gushing blood. It meant nothing to him. He wondered whether like Homer he would be able to turn away from the fall of Troy, leave unsaid what no poet could describe. Perhaps this place, this horror, was beyond description, and would be blotted out in a paralysis of imagination that would follow this war, a war whose end seemed to recede the closer he thought he had got to it.

‘This must be it.’ Stein paused as the track came out on another roadway, with tyre tread marks clearly visible in the dried-up mud on either side. He took a compass out of his pocket and held it level. ‘This runs east-west, exactly where I thought a road might run into the forest from the far side.’ He pocketed the compass, and looked up at the trees. ‘Completely invisible from the air.’