Preston Child - Mystery of the Amber Room

‘It looks like a goddamn space ship,’ he thought to himself as he examined the architecture of the Kazakh Black Sun citadel. In the center, the building was empty, a huge space where mammoth machines or aircraft could be stored or constructed. All around it, the steel structure provided ten stories of offices, server stations, interrogation chambers, dining halls and accommodations, boardrooms, and laboratories. Purdue was in awe of the efficiency of the power supply and scientific infrastructure of the building, but he had to keep moving.

He crept through the dark crawlspaces of out-of-commission furnaces and dusty workshops in search of an exit or at least any working communication apparatus he could use to call help. To his relief, he discovered an old air traffic control room that appeared to have been unused for decades.

‘Probably part of some Cold War launch stations,' he frowned as he surveyed the equipment in the rectangular room. Keeping his eye on the tinged old piece of mirror he had taken from an empty laboratory, he proceeded to hot-wire the only device he recognized. ‘Looks like an electronic version of a Morse Code transmitter,’ he guessed as he sank to his haunches to find the cable to connect to the socket in the wall. The machine was only for broadcasting number sequences, so he had to try and remember the training he had received long before his stint to Wolfenstein years ago.

After getting the machine to work and directing its antennae toward what he reckoned was north, Purdue found a transmission device that worked like a telegraph machine, but could link up to geostationary telecommunications satellites with the correct codes. With this machine, he could convert phrases into their numerical equivalents and employ an Atbash cipher in conjunction with a mathematical coding system. ‘Binary would have been so much quicker,’ he seethed as the antiquated device kept losing his results due to short sporadic power outages from voltage fluctuations in the power lines.

When Purdue finally produced adequate clues for Nina to solve on his Enigma machine at home, he hacked into the old system to establish a link to the telecommunication feed. It was a stretch to attempt contacting a phone number this way, but he had to try. This was the only way he could get the number sequences to Nina with a transmission window of twenty seconds to her service provider, but surprisingly he succeeded.

It did not take long before he heard Kemper's men running through the steel and concrete stronghold looking for him. His nerves were frayed, even though he had managed to make his emergency call. He knew it would realistically take days until they found him, so there were harrowing hours ahead for him. If they found him, Purdue feared his punishment would be of the kind he would never recover from.

With his body still aching, he had nestled himself into a deserted sub-basement water basin behind locked iron doors covered with cobwebs and eaten by rust. It was plain to see that nobody had entered there in years, making it the perfect hideout for the injured fugitive.

Purdue was hidden so well while waiting for his rescue, that he did not even notice that the citadel was under attack two days later. Nina had contacted Haim and Todd, Purdue's computer experts, to shut down the power grid in the surrounding area. She had given them with the coordinates Detlef had received from Milla after he had tuned into the numbers station. With this information, the two Scots wreaked havoc on the compound's electricity supply and main communication system and caused interferences on all devices such as laptops and cell phones within a radius of two miles around the Black Sun stronghold.

Sam and Detlef breached the main entrance stealthily with a strategy they had prepared before flying into the Kazakh Steppe's desolate countryside by helicopter. They had secured the assistance of Purdue's Polish affiliate, PoleTech Air & Transit Services. While the men invaded the compound, Nina waited in the craft with the military-trained pilot, checking the vicinity with infrared imaging on the lookout for hostile movements.

Detlef was armed with his Glock, two hunting knives, and one of his two expandable batons. The other one he had given to Sam. The journalist, in turn, had brought his own Makarov and four smoke grenades. They charged through the main entrance, expecting a hail of bullets in the dark, but instead tripped over several bodies scattered on the floor in the entryway.

“What the hell is going on?” Sam whispered. “These people work here. Who would have killed them?”

“From what I hear these Germans kill their own for the sake of promotion,” Detlef replied under his breath, aiming his torch at the dead men on the floor. “There are about twenty of them. Listen!”

Sam stopped and listened. They could hear the chaos the blackout had caused on the other floors of the building. Carefully they stalked up the first flight of stairs. It was too dangerous to split up in a compound as big as this without knowledge of weaponry or numbers of its occupants. They carefully walked in single-file, guns at the ready, using their torches to light the way.

“Let's hope they don't recognize us as intruders right away,” Sam remarked.

Detlef smiled. “True. Let's just keep moving.”

“Aye,” Sam said. They watched the bobbing lights of some occupants move race toward the generator room. “Oh shit! Detlef, they are going to power up the generator!”

“Move! Move!” Detlef ordered his associate and grabbed him by the shirt. He dragged Sam with him to intercept the security men before they could reach the generator room. Following the flashlight orbs, Sam and Detlef cocked their weapons for the inevitable. As they ran, Detlef asked Sam, “Have you ever killed anyone?”

“Aye, but never deliberately,” Sam answered.

“Good, now you are going to have to — with extreme prejudice!” the big German declared. “No mercy. Or we will never make it out alive.”

“Roger that!” Sam promised as they came face to face with the first four men not more than three feet from the door. The men didn't know that the two figures coming from the other direction were intruders until the first slug split open the first man's skull.

Sam grimaced as he felt the hot splatter of brain matter and blood graze his face, but aimed at the second man in line and he squeezed the trigger without flinching, hitting him dead on. The slain man fell limply at Sam's feet, as he crouched to retrieve his sidearm. He aimed it at the oncoming men who had started firing at them, hitting two more. Detlef took down six men with perfect center-mass shots before following up on Sam's two targets with a slug to the skull each.

“Nicely done, Sam,” the German smiled. “You smoke, right?”

“I do, why?” Sam asked as he wiped the bloody mess from his face and ear. “Give me your lighter,” said his partner from the doorway. He tossed Detlef his Zippo before they entered the generator room and set the fuel tanks on fire. On their way out they disabled the engines with a few well-placed bullets.

Purdue had heard the madness from his small shelter and made for the main entrance, but only because it was the only exit he knew of. Limping heavily with his hand braced against the wall to guide him in the darkness, Purdue slowly climbed the emergency stairs to the foyer of the ground floor.

The doors were wide open, and in the sparse light that fell into the room, he carefully stepped over the bodies until he reached the welcoming breath of the warm, dry air of the desert landscape outside. Weeping with gratefulness and fear, Purdue ran toward the helicopter with his arms waving, hoping to God that it didn't belong to the enemy.