David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

Penn pulled sideways as the sergeant secured his zipper. ‘My sapper guard detachment go through special forces training. You saw the Bundeswehr military police outside, and there’s another cordon around the airfield perimeter. This place is well and truly locked down.’ He picked up his helmet, and Jones took Hiebermeyer’s. ‘You ready? We don our oxygen kit in the next room, immediately abutting the bunker wall. Then we wait for the previous pair to signal that they’re ready to come out, about ten minutes from now. There’s an overlap so four are inside at any one time. We run the shifts with military precision. We don’t want too many in there at once in case there’s a contamination incident.’

Penn walked through a hanging plastic partition and Hiebermeyer followed, with Jones behind. They were inside a polyurethane tunnel between the Portakabin and the bunker structure, a grey mass of concrete that had been partly dug out of the earth in front of them. Above it Hiebermeyer could see the dome of the bubble that encased the site, a strange, disconcerting scene, as if he were walking in a see-through tunnel through an aquarium, watching shapes appear and disappear in the polyurethane as the air movement inside the bubble flexed the plastic, creating a muted drumming noise as if someone were banging to get in from outside.

Immediately in front of them was a structure about the size of a portable toilet, sealed to the concrete surrounding the entrance to the bunker. ‘That’s the airlock,’ Penn said. ‘Beyond that we have no contact with the exterior atmosphere.’ Sergeant Jones picked up a compact backpack that Hiebermeyer recognized as an oxygen rebreather, with a cylinder protruding from the top and a hose on either side. Penn took another one, and glanced at Hiebermeyer. ‘You’ll be familiar with these from Jack’s kit. We use rebreathers because they’re completely self-contained, with no chance of contamination through an exhaust valve.’ Hiebermeyer felt the sweat on his brow, and took a deep breath. He felt hemmed in and suddenly wanted to be outside. He closed his eyes and took another couple of deep breaths, wiping his brow with his hands.

‘You okay?’ Penn asked, shifting his shoulders to ease on the rebreather and tighten the straps, peering at him. ‘It’s normal to feel spooked. One of my corporals said it’s like a tunnel into a nightmare, as if the real history of this place is just beyond that plastic membrane and has never gone away. I know that’s hardly reassurance, but if you’re feeling something like that, you’re not the only one.’

Hiebermeyer tried to relax. ‘I’ve been down tunnels before in Egypt and come face to face with some pretty nightmarish apparitions. It’s wearing the suit and being inside this bubble that takes a little getting used to.’

Jones finished tightening Penn’s straps and lifted the rebreather on to Hiebermeyer’s back. ‘Before we put on our helmets, I’ll give you a quick rundown on the structure,’ Penn said. He glanced at the red light that was shining above the door, then at the watch strapped around his left arm. ‘We should be ready to go in five minutes.’ He pointed to a plan on a small clipboard hanging from his neck. It showed a long, rectangular building with an entrance passage lined by small rooms on either side, then a large central chamber and a further area at the far end of the bunker, shaded over in pencil. ‘It’s like a large Nissen hut, a massive corrugated-iron tunnel, a classic bomb-shelter design,’ Penn said. ‘You said your grandfather was a U-boat captain? Then you’ll be interested to know that the concrete outer shell is based on the design of U-boat pens. The roof is built using a Fangrost bomb trap, concrete beams about a metre apart laid over support beams on the roof, creating space where the blast from bombs detonating against the upper beams would dissipate sideways. That’s how the U-boat pens survived everything the Allies could throw at them, and that’s how this bunker survived the raid on the forest on 25 April 1945.’

‘It seems incredible overengineering, in an obscure place in a forest where they could hardly have expected an attack,’ Hiebermeyer said.

‘Some of the paperwork survived in the front office of the bunker. The place was built by Organisation Todt, the Nazi state construction agency run by Fritz Todt, and specifically by the naval construction department, the Marinebauwesens. The naval department had the greatest expertise in bombproof bunkers, as they built the huge U-boat pens at places like Brest and Lorient. The bunker would have been built using forced labour, of course, and the Organisation Todt had its own Polizei regiment as well as dedicated Schutzkommando who would have been perfectly at home supervising slave labour next to their fellow SS thugs in the camp. We think the labourers were Soviet prisoners of war, and that those who didn’t die on the job were executed to make sure that as few people as possible knew about this place. I mentioned an excavation in the camp, and you’ll see what I mean.’ Penn paused, glancing down. ‘Every time I look at these places and get wrapped up in the technology, I have to force myself to stand back and remember that everything the Nazis created, everything, had a cost in lives and blood. We’ve been brought up to think this was all about ruthless efficiency, about the expediency of employing people the Nazis regarded as subhuman. But there was more to it than that. It’s as if the Nazi bosses fed on the terror, as if the blood were an opiate. You see it in the eyes of those Nazis in the photographs, crazed and hungry for more. Every time we excavate one of these places, I feel as if we’re unlocking the ghosts they created who have been screaming ever since, and that we’re releasing them from the nightmare.’

Hiebermeyer swallowed hard. As an archaeologist he had often thought about whether he was violating the dead, not in a spiritual sense but in terms of his own receptivity to the past: whether he was breaking a bond more important than the richest grave goods, whether by walking through a tomb entrance he was severing his empathy with people who had invested so much in sending their dead to the afterlife in tombs that were meant to be sealed for all time. But in this place, where the ghosts had not been laid to rest, where they seemed so close, it felt different, unnerving, as if he could sense the emotions, the terror, but also the most horrifying thing to him of all: the demonic certainty of the perpetrators that they were on a righteous path. It was like nothing he had felt before in all those tunnels of antiquity. He remembered the silhouettes of hands he had seen with Jack on a visit to the Lascaux cave in southern France when they were students, prehistoric hands that seemed in the flickering torchlight to be pressing out from inside the rock, spirits whose faces lay just beyond their vision. Here, looking at the shapes in the plastic, he felt the same, as if the swirling images he saw were faces caught in a scream, pressing against the membrane that had kept them locked in terrible torment.

He shook the image from his mind, and forced himself to concentrate on the plan on the clipboard. ‘Albert Speer took over Organisation Todt, didn’t he?’

Penn nodded. ‘From 1942. But that’s the odd thing. None of the paperwork was signed by Todt or by Speer. All we found were three sheets in a partly incinerated folder on the floor of the front office, beside a brazier. Someone had clearly been trying to burn it all, but must have left in a hurry. They were the usual Nazi foolscap order papers, with minutiae of costings for materials: concrete, steel girders, electrical and other equipment. But it was bizarre. Each of them had been approved and signed by the Reichsfuhrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler.’