David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

Heidi put her hand on Hiebermeyer’s head, and bowed her own, saying nothing for a moment. Then she looked up to Jack. ‘The last time I saw Ernst was just before dawn on the second of May 1945. I was in a farmhouse outside Plon, near the Baltic coast. Two nights previously a Gestapo team had taken Hans and me from our house in a village south of Berlin, just as it was about to be overrun by the Russians. I had no idea what was going on. Gestapo coming in the night was usually bad news, but I was grateful. I thought there was no chance that I would have survived the Red Army. But then while Hans was still asleep that night at Plon, Ernst arrived with an escort of two SS men, having just flown in from Berlin. We only had twenty minutes alone together. I told the SS this might be our last chance for a while. I knew how to talk to these men, remember. I took them out of Ernst’s earshot while he was looking at Hans asleep and said that if they returned later, I would see that they were not disappointed. When we got into the bedroom, all Ernst did was talk. He told me he’d come from the Zoo flak tower, and had been visited by Himmler. To my horror, I realized that he had become part of Himmler’s plan. I also realized that Hans and I were being used as a bargaining chip. Ernst told me he had secretly written a diary of everything he knew, all the secrets and subterfuge of those awful final months in Berlin, and that he had left it with some crates of artefacts in the Zoo tower for the KGB to discover. He was carrying a satchel with something heavy in it. I didn’t ask what it was, but he said he also had something he’d retrieved from a secret place under the Zoo tower. I knew instantly what it was, because that was where the refined product of our research in the laboratory was to be stored. I now knew that it was a weapon that Himmler had secretly created and planned for his own purpose. Ultimately, only a single sample had been saved, all others having been destroyed deliberately to ensure that Himmler had complete control.’

‘The Spanish flu virus,’ Jack said quietly.

She nodded. ‘Ernst showed me the small metal tube. He said a U-boat was waiting, one of the latest types that could go stealthily for weeks without refuelling. At the U-boat’s destination, he was to unlock a chamber and place the phial inside; once he had done that, word would be radioed back and Hans and I would follow in another U-boat, accompanied by Himmler himself.’

‘But you knew that plan was all a charade,’ Jack said softly.

‘Ernst held my hand. He said he would do everything in his power to send that phial to the deepest depths of the ocean. He said he knew there would be men in the submarine watching his every move, whose task was probably to eliminate him once the delivery had been made. But he said he’d spent hours in a Type-21 U-boat during a promotional visit to a shipyard, and had been fascinated by the machinery. That was Ernst for you. He could ignore all the horror around him as long as he had a good machine to play with. He said he’d worked out how to fire a torpedo, and he’d realized on the flight from Berlin how he could eject the phial from a torpedo tube. He said he would find a way of sealing himself in the torpedo room and doing it, even if it meant no chance of escape for him.’

‘Do you believe he did it?’

Heidi swallowed hard, suddenly looking very frail. ‘I knew I’d never see him again. Part of me wanted that. If he’d found out the truth about Hans, about me, it would have destroyed him. You must remember, with the advance of the Red Army, we all thought we were going to die. But even if I were to live, I wanted that happiness we had experienced in the few days of his leave during our brief time as man and wife to still be there, to be sealed in the past where I could go when I shut my eyes. I only wish I had been right about that. I yearn to see it again, but I can’t.’

‘You will, Tante Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said, holding her hand. ‘You will.’

She turned to Jack. ‘In answer to your question, yes. With all my heart I believe he would have done it. I have never doubted that the virus was destroyed, somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.’

‘We don’t want Saumerre knowing that,’ Jack murmured. ‘Our plan depends on him thinking that what his man Auxelle took from the bunker was a lesser toxic agent, far exceeded by the virus. If he thinks the virus is destroyed, he might be tempted to use what he has, the Alexander bacterium. That would be bad enough.’

‘What do we do now?’ Hiebermeyer said.

‘Two things.’ Heidi firmly put Hiebermeyer’s hand away and straightened herself up, drying her eyes. ‘I am going to organize you.’

‘That sounds like the Tante Heidi I remember,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘First,’ she said, ‘you need to find out where the U-boat was heading. All I know for certain is that it was the place where Himmler’s men discovered those symbols, the underwater cavern I saw in that slideshow at Wewelsburg. Here’s the only clue I can give you. The Ahnenerbe man who gave that lecture on Atlantis, Ernst’s old student acquaintance? He’s still alive.’

‘How do you know?’ Jack said.

‘As I get older and so many of us die, historians more often come to me for interviews about my experiences in Nazi Germany. And there are always treasure-hunters who think they’re on the trail of Nazi loot. One researcher came to my home recently, a few weeks ago. He said he’d found a surviving Ahnenerbe man in Canada who knew I was alive because I’d been interviewed for a TV programme he’d seen, and he’d advised the researcher to find me.’

Jack cast Hiebermeyer a concerned glance, then looked back at Heidi. ‘What did he want?’

‘Really he seemed to want me to talk much as I have to you. To reveal something he thought I knew, about Himmler and his plan. Once I knew who the Ahnenerbe man was, that didn’t surprise me.’

‘But you didn’t tell the researcher anything.’

‘Of course not. All I told him was that I’d been a willing sex worker in the Lebensborn. That really I’d just been a prostitute. I’m quite capable of putting that act on again, you know. That shut him up.’

‘So who was the Ahnenerbe man?’

She paused. ‘Ernst knew him from Heidelberg University before the war. He was much more of a scholar than Ernst, quite aloof. I got to know him because several times I had…’ she paused, ‘accommodated him at the Lebensborn farm. He was not at all the right Aryan type, tall and thin and Prussian, but Himmler often sent favourites down to us for entertainment, really using us as little more than a whorehouse. As I said, you always find out things in the bedroom that shouldn’t be said. He told me he had denounced to the Gestapo his and Ernst’s old professor, a reluctant Ahnenerbe recruit who had become a drunk and talked too much. Later, after he saw me in the audience of his lecture at Wewelsburg with Ernst, he forced me to visit him in secret for sex, saying he would tell Ernst the truth about me otherwise. A true Prussian gentleman. I’d been fascinated by that slide showing the underwater cavern and asked him where it was, but he himself had not been on the expedition and he hadn’t been told. But if anyone has clues, it’s him. His name was von Schoenberg.’

Jack looked stunned. ‘Von Schoenberg? Professor von Schoenberg? The classical scholar?’

‘You know of him?’

Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘While we were students at Cambridge, he came on sabbatical to work with James Dillen. Do you remember we went together to his seminar on Phoenician exploration in the Atlantic?’

‘ Mein Gott. Yes. I argued with him that it wasn’t the Phoenicians, it was the Egyptians who first circumnavigated Africa.’