David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

‘Dr Hiebermeyer? David Penn. Royal Engineers.’ A small, fit-looking man in his early thirties came into the room, wearing a camouflage smock with a major’s star on his epaulettes.

Hiebermeyer held out his gloved hand. ‘Maurice.’

Sergeant Jones returned and quickly went over to the CBRN suits on the racks, selecting one and checking it over. Penn took off his beret and boots and Jones helped him into the suit as he talked. ‘I understand that Jack Howard won’t be here?’

‘He’s diving, in the Black Sea. But he’s on standby to join us, depending on what we find. I’m planning to call him after I’ve seen inside.’

‘I spoke to him on the phone at length last week when my team arrived here. I understand you have a personal connection with this place?’

‘Not this place exactly, but my father’s family home was about twenty kilometres north-west of here. My grandfather was a merchant seaman and then a naval officer, a U-boat captain lost with his vessel in 1940, and my grandmother and father and his two younger sisters remained here for the rest of the war. In April 1945 they were among the civilians taken by British troops into Belsen to see the horrors there. My father was only nine years old but was very badly affected. They were made to stand beside a truck while former SS guards loaded corpses. For the rest of his life my father couldn’t stand the smell of raw meat or rotting garbage. The British officer who conducted them into the camp said that what they were about to see was such a disgrace to the German people that their name must be erased from the list of civilized nations. He said it could only be restored when they had reared a new generation amongst whom it was impossible to find people prepared to commit such crimes. My father was a very responsible nine-year-old who saw himself as head of the family after his father had been killed, and he took those words to heart and interpreted them literally. He believed the officer was saying that he, a child, was forever guilty, because he had been born before the war. Even after my father had grown up and realized that the officer had not meant that, he told me that because he had spent his childhood and teenage years after the war believing in his own guilt, it would never escape him. He said that the only hope lay in my generation and beyond. So I grew up with this legacy too.’

Penn picked up a pointer and tapped a plan of the airfield pinned to the wall. ‘Then you’ll know that there was a labour camp here, an Arbeitslager, a satellite of Belsen. Its remains lie mostly under the northern end of the airfield. We’ve done one excavation there I’ll need to explain to you, but let’s leave that until we’ve been into the bunker. Did your father know anything about this place?’

‘He said his father and uncles used to hunt in the forest before the war. My father remembered the night when this sector of the forest was destroyed, a massive orange glow on the horizon.’

Penn nodded. ‘The twenty-fifth of April 1945, only hours after the camp was evacuated. A five-hundred-bomber Lancaster raid was diverted from Bremen to destroy the forest. The British 21st Army Group had been concerned that pockets of SS would stage a fanatical resistance there and hold up the Allied advance. The bombing obliterated the camp and buried the bunker under tons of earth and felled trees, which is why it remained unrecorded when the NATO airfield was built over the site after the war.’

‘Nobody in 21st Army Group knew about it?’

Penn shook his head. ‘Few of the SS camp guards survived. The British SAS who liberated the camp shot a number of them, and others who fled into the forest were hunted down by the more able-bodied inmates. I’ve seen the file with all the information that Jack and his daughter amassed last year from interviewing Captain Frazer, the British officer who was in the camp. So we know that his friend Major Mayne and an American officer, a Colonel Stein, had been here looking for stolen Nazi treasures, but that the two men disappeared. My assumption is that they went into the forest looking for the bunker and got caught out in the bombing raid, or fell foul of guards still stationed here. There’s no evidence for them in the bunker yet, but we’ve only cleared half of it. No word of its existence got back to 21st Army Group headquarters.’

‘How did it survive the bombing raid?’

‘It’s a remarkable piece of engineering,’ Penn enthused. ‘I’ll brief you as we go in. Construction was my speciality at the School of Military Engineering, but because there’s not much call for this kind of thing these days, I volunteered for the NBS clearance unit, now CBRN, which would at least give me a chance to examine these places. There’s a lot of redevelopment and construction work going on in Germany now, and a lot more underground sites are being found. I read that article you wrote last year about the archaeology of the Nazi period in Der Spiegel, and I completely agree with you about making these places scheduled monuments like any other archaeological site. It’s going to become a big political issue in Berlin, because major pipeline and utility works are planned in the centre around the Tiergarten, and there must be an enormous amount to be discovered there.’

‘An old friend of mine is a stalwart of the Berlin Second World War archaeology group, a voluntary organization that has been lobbying for more resources to do proper excavations there,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘There are also major refurbishments planned at the Berlin Zoo on the edge of the Tiergarten, on the site of the huge flak tower that was once there. That’s where the Schliemann treasures from the Berlin prehistory museum were stored, where the Russians found them. My friend believes there are tunnels from there to the site of Gestapo headquarters and the Reichstag. They’re actually doing some more exploring this week, and I’m hoping to go there after this for a quick visit.’

Penn looked at him intently. ‘Fascinating. I’d like to collaborate. There are a couple of sites in Berlin that need our expertise, possible chemical and biological production sites. It’s frightening how little is known about these places and what went on inside them. Many were deliberately hushed up, part of Allied policy. We cleared a newly discovered part of the Sarin II nerve-gas production bunker at Falkenhagen near Berlin a few months ago, a really grim place that looked as if it had been abandoned only days before.’

‘It must feel as if you’re still fighting the Second World War.’

Penn’s head briefly disappeared from view as he ducked into his suit and pushed through the rubber neck seal. He struggled out, shaking his head in a cloud of chalk powder, and then stretched his arms out to pull the flaps tight over his chest for the zipper to be shut. ‘Sergeant Jones here calls us bunker-busters.’ He staggered backwards as Jones yanked the zipper. ‘But we do real war too. We’re due to fly out to the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan in two weeks. We get called out every time they find a cave complex with weapons caches that might include the bad stuff. I mentioned it to Jack during our phone call, and was amazed to hear he’d been up the valley two years ago, at the site of the old lapis lazuli mines. Something about a shady Chinese mafia group who were after the same thing as he was. It must be more of a free-for-all in northern Afghanistan than we realize. Jack told me he’d been on the trail of a Royal Engineers ancestor of his, a colonel who died up there during the time of the Raj. Who’d have thought British sappers would be back there in the twenty-first century.’

Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It was a big thing for Jack, finding that place. Unfortunately that mafia organization is still ticking over. You can emasculate them, but they grow back.’ Hiebermeyer remembered Saumerre, Rebecca’s kidnapping last year, the eyes that would be somewhere on them now, watching for any hint of a discovery that might bring the worst of those groups back to haunt not just IMU but the entire world. He glanced at Penn. ‘The security here is pretty tight? I don’t mean the biological containment, but security against infiltration?’