David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

Jack suddenly stopped. He had only been half listening. ‘Where did you say?’

‘A camp, near Belsen. In Upper Saxony, Germany. One of many satellite camps, probably.’

Jack turned to Costas, who had also stopped and was staring at him. They both looked at Wladislaw. Jack felt a chill of certainty. It all made sense. An object secreted away here, in a place apparently impregnable from discovery, secure for ever in the heart of the thousand-year Reich. But then the unthinkable happened. The war was being lost. An ultimatum was activated. The object was removed, taken west. It was to be the signal for the worst horrors to be unleashed. Jack remembered the story Dillen had told him from Hugh. The document Hugh had found on the motorcycle courier, with the counterclockwise swastika. The Agamemnon Code. Jack thought hard, staring at the ground, his heart pounding. The people who had kidnapped Rebecca must not hear this story. They must not know that the object might no longer be here. The three men who would be diving with them. At all costs they must not know. He looked at Wladislaw. ‘Did the survivor tell you anything else?’

‘He saw the Luftwaffe officer when they entered the camp near Belsen, and said that he still had the bag with him. He never saw him again after that. He thought the bag must contain some great treasure stolen from a museum in Poland, hidden to begin with in this mine. They all thought that was what the Nazis stored down here. By telling me the story, he thought he was doing a service to Poland. There might be a chance of recovering the treasure, somewhere, somehow, and bringing it back home. ’

Jack tensed up. ‘Does anyone else know this? Anyone? ’

‘The man told me he’d never told anyone else. He spoke to me in my office, where you met me. He insisted on locking the door. He told me he was old and dying. He’d come back to this place for the first time since 1945, had seen that we had a memorial to the Jewish prisoners. He’d asked to see me. I was very busy that day, but I remembered the story a few days later and phoned the place that looked after him. They said he’d died the day after coming here. Just slipped away.’

‘Who else have you told? Your friends? Your family?’

Wladislaw shook his head. ‘Nobody. It was the day we took that phone call from you, from IMU headquarters. When you said you wanted to come here to search for the Neolithic remains. I thought I’d save this story until you came. Icing on the cake for you.’

Jack looked intently at Costas, then at Wladislaw. ‘A pact, just the three of us, right? We tell nobody about this. Not until we can take it further. Nobody. Not even our three friends waiting below.’

‘Done,’ Costas said. Wladislaw stared at Jack. ‘Of course. You have my word.’

Jack slapped his back. ‘Good man. Now let’s move.’

‘We should get you over to the IMU campus in Cornwall, Wlady,’ Costas said as they clattered down. ‘I invited you when we met at that conference, remember? I didn’t know there was an archaeologist in you then. We need an IMU representative in Poland. What do you think, Jack?’

‘Excellent idea,’ Jack said.

‘You really think so?’ Wladislaw said. ‘You would not be disappointed in me, I assure you.’

‘Take it as a done deal,’ Jack said. ‘But for now, news blackout.’

‘Total secrecy,’ Wladislaw agreed.

Jack glanced at Costas as they followed Wladislaw off the metal walkway and on to a platform of wooden duckboards. They had reached the end of the complex that was open to the public, barred off with a mesh barrier but with a little door that Wladislaw swung open. It was cooler now, and damper. They crouched through and carried on. The way ahead was a narrowing void, the timber vaulting fitted into the wall becoming sporadic and then finishing altogether. The duckboards ended, and Jack could see where the boards had lain over a narrow-gauge railway line that carried on ahead down the tunnel. The ceiling was just high enough for the tunnel to have been used for pushing carts up from the deepest mine workings. After a few more metres the passage widened into a chamber the size of a small room, also lit by a single bulb. On the sides Jack could just make out shadowy forms, half-finished sculptures in salt that seemed to leer out of the walls, inchoate. It was a macabre place, like a catacomb. Wladislaw pointed his torch at one of the figures. ‘St Clement, patron saint of miners,’ he said, his voice sounding strangely dull again, without any echo. ‘This is not like the sculptures you see on the tourist route. These ones are the real deal. They were done long ago, hundreds of years ago, by the miners, not for visitors but for themselves. They show what the miners really felt, the terrible fear, the pact with God they made to come down here, the bargain they made to survive.’

Jack stared at the sculpted face in the torchlight. It looked like Munch’s The Scream. Secondary recrystallization had clouded the features, obscuring the sculpted lines, as if the salt in the walls were reclaiming the figure, absorbing it back into a world of stone where humans were never meant to pass. Wladislaw went forward and they carried on. The passageway was now only just tall enough for Jack. It dropped at a steeper angle, dipping to follow the salt seam, the walls shadowy and deathly grey. He felt a tiny lurch, a tightness of the breath, then steeled himself. If you feel fear, it is fear that you will let Rebecca down. It is not fear of this place. He saw light ahead, another chamber. The light reflected off a pool of water, green and iridescent, as if it were full of algae. ‘The colour’s from copper,’ Wladislaw said. ‘The water might be like that ahead. Nobody’s explored it for years, since it flooded.’

They entered the chamber. It was the very last one before the tunnel disappeared underwater. Above the pool was a string of suspended light bulbs, trailed down on the cord they had followed from the upper chambers. On the left side three men sat kitted up in diving suits and SCUBA twin-sets, filled with the oxygen, helium and nitrogen mix tailored for their dive by Costas at IMU the night before. They had their hoods on, so Jack saw only three constricted faces, barely distinguishable from one another. He made out the red letters tattooed on the hands of one of the men: Chechnya. He remembered what had happened in the war in Chechnya, to the children, and he felt physically repulsed. These men, others like them, were holding Rebecca. There would be a price to pay. He stared at them, and then followed Costas a few steps to the right, where their own equipment was bagged and locked. Costas gave the bags a quick inspection, then unlocked them. They quickly pulled out their gear and silently kitted up. Jack stripped down to his underwear and T-shirt and pulled on his e-suit, turning to let Costas zip up the neck seal, then he did the same for Costas in return. They helped each other don the rebreathers and yellow Kevlar helmets, each with a sealable visor instead of the conventional face masks the other three men were using. They hooked in the intake and exhaust tubes to the base of the helmets and then sat down by the water’s edge, pulling on their fins and letting their legs dangle in the water. Jack looked into the green haze. He could barely see his legs. At least they had the 3-D navigation system, following the route Wladislaw had mapped in.

He activated his rebreather and helmet computer system, testing the mouthpiece and cross-checking with Costas, then strapped on the wrist computer he always carried as a back-up. He still liked to see his dive time and depth on his wrist, as he had been trained to do before the advent of dive computers and all the technology they were using today. He glanced at the time. There was no way of knowing how long the dive would last. If they were going to a hundred metres’ depth, it would be twenty minutes, twenty-five maximum. The rebreather would minimize nitrogen intake and decompression problems, but they had no safety margin.