David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

They turned right and followed the track as it curved round and headed west again. After about a hundred metres it began to drop in a slight gradient, cutting down into the forest floor. They carried on down until they came to an overhang created by giant tree trunks that had been deliberately laid across the track like roof beams, with enough space beneath them for a large lorry to back down. Mayne scanned the gloom ahead. ‘This must lead to an underground bunker, cleverly concealed. They had to remove some big trees to dig it out, but then they covered it again by transplanting trees over an area about two hundred yards square, beyond those beams. That’s what must have kept those Soviet prisoners busy. They’ve even cabled together the tops of some of the big trees surrounding the clearing to bend them inwards, to make it look like continuous forest from the air.’

He held his revolver at the ready and they advanced cautiously under the beams. About ten metres ahead he could see the dull grey of a concrete wall, just as he had guessed. In the middle of the wall was the black face of a metal door, with two massive metal latches padlocked over it. Mayne reached the door and tried the padlocks, to no avail. He stood back, took a deep breath, then squatted down. ‘We can’t do anything here by ourselves. We need to wait for my sappers to come and blow these latches off.’

Stein tried the locks. ‘What time is Lewes due back?’

Mayne checked his watch. ‘Seventeen thirty hours in the camp. That’s almost three hours from now. We can either go back to the camp now, or leave going back for an hour so we don’t have to spend any more time than we need to in that place.’ He looked at Stein, and they both slumped back wordlessly against the metal door. Mayne took out his cigarettes, but then thought better of it. He craved the nicotine, but the smell was too close to the smell of burning in the camp. He wondered if he’d ever smoke again. He shoved the pack back into his battledress tunic, cracked open his revolver to check the chambers again, then stared at Stein. ‘This monuments and fine arts stuff. It’s really a front, isn’t it? You’ve pretty well implied as much. I never bought the idea that art was such a priority. I was there when we bombed the monastery at Cassino, remember? And look what we did to Dresden. This is total war. And anyway, I saw the way you handled that pistol. You’re not just an honorary soldier.’

Stein was silent for a moment, then spoke quietly. ‘The MFAA is genuine. And we’re all experts, passionate about art. But you’re right. I did the full Special Operations Executive training course. We’re the kind of people they wanted. Academics, art historians, archaeologists, people with a keen eye, able to spot details, to find clues, accustomed to working in the field. But not laboratory scientists. They come later.’

‘Scientists?’

Stein stared at him. ‘The war may nearly be over. This war. But this may only be the beginning. We know the Nazis were developing super-bombs, using nuclear fission. We’re pretty confident that most of the research was still on the drawing board, and the Allied bombing campaign has wiped out most of that. But there’s another threat, even more terrifying. Have you ever wondered why Hitler never used chemical or biological weapons on the battlefield? It wasn’t for any ethical reason. Look at what we’ve just seen, the camp. There were no ethics.’ Stein shook his head. ‘It’s because the Nazi research efforts were not going towards tactical weapons, but towards strategic ones. Not battlefield weapons, but weapons of mass destruction. Towards something even worse than that. Towards a doomsday weapon.’

‘ A doomsday weapon? What the hell do you mean?’

‘With the end so near, there might be a final fanatical edict. Remember what Hitler said at the Nuremberg rally in 1938? He said that either there would be a thousand-year Reich, or there would be no Germany. No Germany means no world. Hitler made a suicide pact with his own people. And if the time came, if his armies were truly close to annihilation, there had to be a way of unleashing Armageddon. We know from our interrogated Nazi official that the signal was the Allied crossing of the Rhine. That was when Hitler knew he could never win on the battlefield. A small number of men were activated to be ready to unleash hell, to wait for the time of Hitler’s choosing. We fear that time is nearly upon us.’

Mayne tapped the steel door. ‘And you think this is it?’

‘We believe that stolen art caches, maybe in bunkers like this one, might have been a cover for research facilities. They would have been the most top-secret facilities of all, concealed with all the ingenuity the Nazis could muster, even from their own people. Nuclear weapons research needs a lot of space. For biological research, the kind of thing I’m talking about, you only need a small room and a school chemistry set.’

Mayne suddenly had a cold feeling in his gut. ‘Good God. And a supply of human test subjects. Those people the Frenchman told Cameron about, trucked in here by the Nazis.’

‘That’s why the camp was also a plausible cover. Nobody was going to bat an eyelid if they saw truckloads of people go into camps like this but never come out again.’

‘So what do we do?’ Mayne murmured. ‘Get the RAF raid cancelled? Corps HQ could get a reserve brigade up to this forest by nightfall. Mop up any SS still out here.’

Stein shook his head. ‘This has to stay top secret. It’s not only Nazi fanatics we’re worried about. There are others, too.’

Mayne paused. ‘The Soviets?’

‘Allied intelligence is riddled with spies, Communist sympathizers from before the war. A lot of them came out of Oxford and Cambridge. I took a chance with you. For all I know, you might be one of them.’

Mayne snorted. ‘I was an idealist, but my fantasy world was three thousand years old, the world of Homer. You’re right, though. There were plenty of Communists among my school and university friends. And while we’re pointing fingers, several art historians I knew, even at the Courtauld.’

‘That’s what I mean. I could reel off some big names from the art world, really big names, now working in intelligence. Keeping these people in place, using them, has been part of the complex planning for the world after the war. Some of our discoveries of Nazi research have deliberately been leaked. And that’s where the background of the MFAA comes into play. We’re scholars, not generals or politicians. We want to do all we can to end this war, but our aim is not to find weapons that can be used against the Nazis. Our aim is preventing such weapons from ever being used. Here’s the take. Either everyone has them, or nobody does. If both sides in the new world have horror weapons, then nobody will use them, right? That’s the gamble. Our intelligence planners call it mutually assured destruction. If everything works according to plan, that’ll become the catchphrase of the new war ahead of us, a war of standoff. It’ll be the nearest we can get to recreating the detente in Europe during the decades after the defeat of Napoleon, before the Franco-Prussian War tipped the balance and set all this in train.’

‘So both the Allies and the Soviets will have nuclear technology,’ Mayne murmured, keeping his eyes on the woods.

Stein nodded, waving his pistol. ‘But a biological weapon is another matter. All you need is a test tube. There may be many bit-players who could become terrifyingly dangerous in a fragmented world: resurgent fascist groups, or religious extremists like the Wahabists of the Middle East. A flashpoint may be a new Jewish homeland in Palestine. Our arrival may have saved those people in the camp today, but the fate of their children is what I’m talking about. The fate of all children.’