David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘This tunnel doesn’t look like salt mining,’ Costas said. ‘It looks like someone was building a storage facility.’

‘And then abandoned it halfway,’ Jack replied. ‘None of the side chambers are finished.’

‘The Nazis?’

‘It’s difficult to see why miners might have come down here. This deep, it may often have been flooded, by changes in the water table like the one that causes the water to be so deep now. The odd thing is, it might make sense for Neolithic miners to have got this far underground when it was dry, making their way down the natural fissure where that shaft is. We know that Stone Age painters could get a long way into cave systems. And they may have been looking for especially prized halite crystals only found this deep. But for later miners with metal tools, there was a lot of salt still to be dug out much closer to the surface.’

They reached the end of the metal tracks. Jack rolled over and looked up, seeing the shimmering surfaces of pools where methane gas had accumulated. He looked back to the end of the shaft, where the first of the Russians had appeared. ‘Christ. They’ve come all the way down. At least fifteen metres beyond the safe depth with trimix. About where nitrogen narcosis will really kick in too.’

‘Drunk, narked and on a one-way ticket to hell,’ Costas said.

‘But dangerous. Did you see their knives?’

‘Roger that. Let’s get this done.’

They swam forward beyond the end of the track, through the crack in the rock. Ahead of them the fissure carried on as far as they could see, with a crudely cut pathway along the floor. On either side were shimmering crystal caverns, some with halite crystals five or six centimetres across. Costas was ahead, and after only a few metres he stopped and sank down to about a metre above the floor, over an area where the crystals seemed to be remarkably uniform in size, as if they had all grown from the same genesis. ‘You remember Wladislaw and his dating of the salt growth to the Neolithic? Take a look at this.’

Jack peered down. Beneath the crystals was a shape, staring up at him. He had seen this before where calcium carbonate, precipitated minerals, formed stalagmites over bones, but never with salt. It was a human skull. He saw a ribcage, leg bones, arms laid over the chest. He could just make out chipped and polished stone tools laid alongside, hand axes and adzes, several still attached to wooden hafts. ‘It’s a burial,’ he murmured. ‘Maybe that’s what these people were doing down here as well, using it as a burial chamber.’ He stared again at the skull. The jaw had dropped, as if it were leering. He remembered the grim sculptures they had seen in the passageway with Wladislaw, the one that had reminded him of Munch’s The Scream. Perhaps this was what those medieval miners had seen. Perhaps it was not their own mortality they feared, but some terrible demon of the depths they had encountered down here – in a place that perhaps was never broached again by the miners, and was only reopened when the Nazis decided to create a top-secret storage facility in these depths.

‘My sensor registers almost zero oxygen in the water,’ Costas said. ‘That’s why it’s so clear. No life here at all.’

‘Ten metres to go, according to my map,’ Jack said, peering into the tunnel. ‘I think I can see something at about that distance, ahead and to the right. A small cavern entrance, maybe. Something blocking it.’

‘Jack, there’s something strange about the floor ahead of us. Odd shapes.’

Jack dumped air from his suit and sank down, staring ahead. Too late he realized that he was going to hit the bottom, and he silently cursed. He prided himself on his buoyancy control. And in caves, silt could be stirred up with barely a touch and completely obscure visibility. He injected a burst of air into his suit and just avoided impact, but watched a pressure wave from his body ripple through the silt ahead. In a fleeting second he realized what Costas had seen. Bodies. Human bodies. Lying on either side of the path. But not solid bodies. As the ripple passed through them they disintegrated and exploded upwards into the water, a great cloud of white particles and flakes that engulfed Costas and wafted towards Jack.

‘Thanks, Jack. A swim through disintegrated human flesh. That rounds off this little excursion nicely.’

Jack swam forward, dropping down into the haze. He saw skeletons, two, three along one side, picks and crowbars strewn haphazardly around, the bones wearing the remains of clothing. ‘This looks a little more recent than our Neolithic friend,’ he murmured. ‘The shoes look pretty modern.’

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘The story from Wladislaw? German officer goes in with Jews and guards, only German officer comes out?’

‘They’ve all been shot in the head, execution style,’ Jack said. ‘You can see the holes, the shattered skulls.’

‘Not these two.’ Costas’ fins were poking out of the cloud of white ahead, and Jack went alongside. The two skeletons below were more contorted, and had fragmented sternums and ribcages as well as holes in their skulls. ‘Different clothing. Look.’ Costas reached down and pulled up a collar. He rubbed it, and Jack saw the SS death’s-head insignia. ‘These must be the two Hungarian SS guards. Remember, the officer came out alone? He must have shot them too. Looks as if he had to catch them unawares, presumably after they’d executed all the Jews.’

Jack stared at the obstruction in the small cavern ahead. ‘I think I know why the officer had to bring them down here. They were carrying something for him.’ He swam closer, and his heart sank. The entrance to the chamber, carved out of the rock salt, was about a metre square, wide enough for a person to crouch inside. He could see a dark cavity beyond. But wedged into the entrance was an unmistakable shape.

It was a bomb.

He was looking at the tail piece of an aerial bomb, four sheet-steel vanes welded to a cone, reinforced with box-shaped struts of bar steel. The cone was striped red and blue, and the rest had been painted green, now streaked with rust. Beyond the cone he could see the extension cylinder with a fuse head, and beyond that the main body of the bomb, but the nose was out of sight inside the cavity. The bomb seemed to be about a metre and a half in length, maybe a little more. It was precariously wedged on the rim of the entrance, with nothing else obvious holding it up beyond.

‘German SD-250, thick-cased fragmentation bomb,’ Costas said, coming alongside. ‘Seventy-nine kilograms of TNT, series five and eight fuses, usually. Huh. Never seen one of these live before.’

Jack shut his eyes. This time, it was going to have to happen.

Costas eyed him. ‘Looks like we don’t have any Turkish navy ordnance disposal divers around to help with this one.’

‘I noticed.’

Costas pulled open a Velcro flap on his leg and extracted a hammer.

‘What are you doing with that?’

‘Well, I have to get at the fuse.’

‘It’s there, look.’

Costas shook his helmet. ‘No. That’s the dummy fuse. The actual fuse is further forward in the main casing, just beyond that rock lip, I reckon. It looks as if the bomb’s been deliberately wedged that far forward to conceal the fuse head, yet left balanced on the rim so it could fall into the cavity or into the cavern where we are now.’

‘Either way wouldn’t make any difference, would it?’

‘Boom.’

‘ Boom.’ Jack shut his eyes. ‘Okay. What next?’

‘The guy was a Luftwaffe officer, right?’

‘That’s what Wladislaw said.’

‘That makes sense. He knew what he was doing. This bomb’s clearly been put here as a booby trap. In which case, there’ll be anti-handling devices.’