David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

Jack looked at the sheet. It was true. It was fantastic. He looked at Wladislaw, forcing himself to smile broadly, and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Brilliant. Brilliant. Now we know we’re on the right track, let’s get down there.’

‘Of course.’ Wladislaw put the sheet back on the table, picked up a ring of keys and led them out of his door. He pressed an alarm box on the wall beside his office and they heard the door lock behind them. ‘That locks up the entire place, the main gates, everything. Exactly as you wished.’

Jack coughed. ‘Very good.’

Wladislaw looked at Costas. ‘Your three colleagues? They are ready?’

‘Familiarizing themselves with some new gear, and kitting up.’

‘New gear?’ Wladislaw said with interest. They reached the sliding metal door of the lift shaft and he opened it up, then pressed a button on the side.

‘State-of-the-art,’ Costas replied. ‘At IMU, the technology’s always one step ahead of the diver. That’s my department.’

‘You’re using trimix? Rebreathers? It’s going to be too deep for compressed air, yes?’

‘Rebreathers for Jack and me, to give us the safest option for very deep water, if we have to go below a hundred metres. The other three are going to be using nitrox from one tank, and then trimix from the other. They’ll be fine to eighty, ninety metres. It’s state-of-the-art too, but it’s easily used by anyone who has used scuba. The rebreathers are a different matter. Only Jack and I are certified for them.’

‘Got you. So the other three guys are back-up. Logistical support.’

‘You got it,’ Costas said.

Wladislaw nodded sagely. ‘I suppose that’s the reality. In Dr Howard’s books, it always seems to be you two alone.’

‘It usually is.’ Costas looked beyond Wladislaw at Jack. ‘Health and safety, you know. Our board of directors have clamped down on us.’

‘I know the problem. Running a tourist mine? Oh yes.’ The lift light flashed green, and Wladislaw slid open the inner door, motioning them inside. ‘Here in Poland, though, we still take risks.’ He grinned, pulled the door shut behind them and pressed the down button, then pressed another button for level 2A. The floor jerked, and Jack could hear the machinery above straining and whirring as the cable paid out. Lifts were not his favourite places. Flooded mines were not his favourite places. It was something else he needed to forget. The near-death experience years ago in a flooded mine shaft, when Costas had saved his life. He needed to stay focused. The lift creaked to a halt, and Wladislaw opened the mesh door. ‘We’re just below the second level, a hundred and twenty metres deep. This route is normally sealed off. We’ll walk through a series of chambers to the pool. It’s faster this way, and there’s a chamber I want you to see.’

Costas turned to Jack. ‘I went with our friends to the base of the shaft, at a hundred and thirty-five metres. That’s the deepest level of these workings. We carried the diving equipment along a shaft about two hundred metres to our entry point.’

Jack stepped out of the lift, followed by the other two. They were in a small cavern about the size of a car garage. Ahead of them a rusting railway track led to a tunnel, lit by a connected string of light bulbs that extended down the tunnel out of sight. Jack took a few steps inside the chamber and put his hands on the wall, feeling the damp. He could see pick and wedge marks, evidently old workings, though the floor and the walls at the lift entrance had clearly been shaped more recently. He looked around. It was the colour that was most unexpected, a dark grey, like wet concrete, with off-white streaks inside the gouge marks. It was almost sepulchral. He turned to Wladislaw. ‘Presumably the man-made tunnels follow the seams?’

Wladislaw nodded. ‘The grey colour is rock salt darkened by surface oxidation. You also get bronze-coloured salt, with iron, and green-coloured, with copper. And there are some crystal-clear patches, where the rock salt’s been dissolved and reconstituted without mineral inclusions.’

‘Those little stalactites,’ Jack said, pointing up at the ceiling.

‘That’s secondary crystallization, from salt leaching out and then solidifying, in the years since this chamber was dug.’

‘We’re well above the water table here?’

Wladislaw nodded. ‘That begins at the pool.’

Costas leaned against a rock pillar in the centre of the chamber, as if testing it, and then pushed hard against a timber support inletted into the salt. He looked sceptically down the tunnel. ‘What’s the structural stability of this place?’

‘Sound enough, where the salt hasn’t been completely dug out. Generally the miners didn’t do that in case it created chambers that were wider than they were high. They always seemed to be mindful of safety. Must have been some terrible accidents early on. You can see there’s been lots of shoring up with timber too. This particular tunnel follows the line of a natural fissure, which is another reason I wanted to bring you this way. It’s the most likely route that Neolithic miners would have taken to get deep underground, and we know it extends off below the main workings beyond that pool. In the early Neolithic, the water level may have been considerably lower, and the deeper fissures and passageways more accessible.’

Jack breathed in deeply. The air had a distinctive heady smell that seemed to sharpen his senses, to revitalize him. He and Costas followed Wladislaw down the tunnel. They stopped at the entrance to another chamber, much larger. Jack took another deep breath, and Wladislaw watched him approvingly. ‘Sodium, calcium, magnesium chloride. The air’s full of it. Enjoy it while you can.’

‘What do you mean, while you can?’ Costas asked.

Wladislaw pointed up. ‘Look at the roof of the cavern.’

Costas craned his neck. ‘Either those are shadows, or it’s scorched.’

‘Before the development of a ventilation system, methane released from the rock would collect in pockets against the ceiling. The miners went round with torches on long poles and burned it off. We’re all right in the main workings, but where you’re going is a different story. You might encounter what look like pockets of air. Except they’re not.’

Jack glanced at Costas, then turned to Wladislaw. ‘Do the others know about this? Our colleagues?’

‘I’ll warn them when we get there.’

Jack shook his head. ‘Thanks, but let Costas do it. That’s what he’s here for. Part of the safety briefing.’

Wladislaw nodded. ‘Of course. You’re the experts.’ He led them into the next cavern, a space that rose above them like the interior of a cathedral, thirty metres or more in height. ‘This will interest you.’ He grinned. ‘One for Jack Howard. The clue to a treasure.’

‘Tell us as we walk,’ Jack said, glancing at his watch. He had little interest in stories now. He could only focus on Rebecca. On what they had come here to do.

‘Okay.’ Wladislaw clattered down the metal stairs, producing an odd dull echo in the chamber. He gesticulated as he spoke. ‘In 1944, the Nazis established an assembly plant for aircraft parts in this chamber. They used Polish Jews as slave labour. When the Soviets came close, the Nazis dismantled the plant and the Jews were sent to the death camps. But one of the Jews who survived came back here recently, and told me a story. He said they all knew the deeper chambers were used by the Nazis to hide treasures. They all assumed it was gold, stolen from the Jews of Poland. There was always a guard post at the entrance to the deep passageway to prevent anyone entering. Then, the night before the evacuation, several of the fitter prisoners were ordered to go down there, with picks and hammers, evidently to do some kind of manual work. They were accompanied by a couple of the Hungarian SS guards and a Luftwaffe officer, the boss of the factory. Only the officer came back out. He was carrying something in a bag. The survivor saw the officer again, because he accompanied the death march from Auschwitz of the Jewish survivors being sent to work on bomb damage in German cities. The officer remained with them until they entered the concentration camp where the survivor was soon afterwards liberated by the British, somewhere near Belsen.’