Douglas Preston - Two Graves

No matter. He had the next best thing to an ammo dump in the small backpack slung over his shoulder: a brace of oxyacetylene tanks, nearly full.

Moving down an old spiral staircase, he paused to listen. The immense size of the fortress and its echoing passageways had proven a godsend, broadcasting the stomp of approaching boots. Indeed, Pendergast had been surprised at the blundering nature of the troops involved in the fortress’s defense, their reactive thinking, their lack of strategy. It was the one detail that didn’t feel quite right to him.

Still, he intended to take advantage of it as long as he could.

Moving still deeper into the older levels of the fortress, he found a tunnel that ran along the inside of the outer perimeter wall. He moved along it, briefly shining the flashlight on the masonry, testing the joints with the point of the purloined knife. The mortar was as rotten as wet soil, but the blocks here were well dressed and fitted together too tightly to be shifted. In some areas there were cracks in the masonry, but they were too small to be serviceable, and the masonry too stable for his purposes.

As he descended to the next level, pausing to listen from time to time, he passed a series of locked, stainless-steel doors set into the inner wall, relatively new doors retrofitted to what had probably once been the dungeons of the fortress, now apparently converted into laboratories. Several of the steel doors were wide open, lights still burning within the labs, giving every impression of having been hurriedly abandoned by the working scientists—perhaps at the sound of gunfire.

Just beyond the series of doors, he found what he was looking for. In the outer foundation wall, a series of large cracks ran upward in a broad radial pattern, with dislocated blocks along their margins. In some places, the cracks were as much as eight to twelve inches broad. The stone floor was similarly cracked. Most interesting. This cracking was not caused by the normal settling of the ground. Just the opposite. Rather, the radial pattern of the cracks implied that a resurgence of the volcano’s caldera floor was taking place—creating massive points of instability that seemed to run right through the base of the twenty-foot-thick curtain wall.

Working fast with the knife, Pendergast first carved away the rotten masonry around a displaced block along the edge of the largest crack, then pried it loose with the point of the pick. By working the block back and forth, he finally managed to slide it out, leaving a gaping hole. Reaching in, he was gratified to find that the interior of the massive wall was traditional eighteenth-century Spanish rubble-core construction, in which dressed stone was used for the facing of the exposed walls, with the large space between filled with loose stones and dirt. Alternating with the knife and the pick, he managed to hollow out a cavity in the rubble large enough to fit the twin cylinders of oxygen and acetylene. Carefully inserting them into place, he checked the wristwatch he had appropriated from one of the guards. If all was going according to schedule, Souza’s men would at this moment be starting to invade the town, preparing to commandeer boats for the assault on the fortress itself. According to the time line they had prepared, in approximately twenty to thirty minutes several boats would land at the island docks, making a diversionary feint, while the boats filled with the main group of Souza’s soldiers would meanwhile be landing in the cove behind the fortress.

He therefore had fifteen minutes to wait. Now would be a good time to examine the laboratories he had passed earlier.

The first lab he came to was locked with a primitive World War II–era mechanism that resisted the ministrations of his knifepoint for only a moment. He found himself in a laboratory, not advanced by modern standards, but adequate for its purpose: the dissection and autopsying of human remains.

But as he examined the space more closely, shining the flashlight around, he noted a small but telling difference between this room and a standard pathology lab, such as might be found in the basement of a hospital. No pathology lab he had ever seen required straps, cuffs, and other restraining devices.

It became clear to Pendergast that this lab was not for dissection; it was for vivisection.

Moving out of the room, Pendergast continued down the hall, shining his light into the open doors or the window insets of the closed ones. Most showed evidence of recent, active use. Several had not even been cleaned, with hair, blood, and bits of sawed bone still littering their gurneys. Much dreadful scientific work had been done here—and despite the apparent sudden abandonment, he nevertheless got the impression that a long-extended project had recently reached its culmination.

Something in one of the locked labs caught his attention. He stopped, peering intently through the window. Once again, he was able to defeat the lock in a matter of moments. The beam of his flashlight revealed a swatch of hair lying on a gurney. Other evidence—including dead insect larvae—indicated that the remains that had lain on this gurney had been in a state of decomposition.

Slowly, very slowly, he moved closer, shining his light on the hair. He noted that it had the precise auburn shade of Helen’s hair; a color that had always reminded him of wildflower honey. Instinctively, he reached out to touch it—then managed to withdraw his hand before it made contact.

A plastic box stood on an organ table, and he went to it and—after a brief hesitation—removed its cover. Inside he found the remains of Helen’s dress, buttons, some personal effects. As he gingerly reached inside and stirred the contents with his fingers, the beam of his light caught a flash of purple. He pushed aside a fragment of cloth to reveal a gold ring, set with a star sapphire.

Pendergast went rigid. For ten minutes, perhaps more, he did not move, simply staring into the box of personal effects. Then he took the ring and placed it in the pocket of his rough prison pants.

Leaving the room as silently as he had entered it, he paused for a minute, listening attentively to the distant drumming of feet, the hoarse bark of shouted commands. Then he quickly returned to the crack in the outer wall and the makeshift oxyacetylene bomb he’d placed within it, glancing at his watch. He was overdue to begin the detonation process.

70

COLONEL SOUZA WAITED WITH HIS MAIN BODY OF MEN, hidden in the heavy forest at the edge of town. He had met with his returning scouts shortly before one PM, and things were exactly as he had hoped. The single road and three trails leading into the town were lightly guarded, but there did not appear to be patrols along the perimeter or elsewhere. The inhabitants did not expect an attack, especially one coming from a random part of the immense forests that encircled the town. They were living with a false sense of security—engendered, no doubt, by their extreme isolation.

The colonel, however, was taking no chances. He had set up a diversionary feint at the road gate, which would occur—he checked his watch—in exactly two minutes. There might be a large body of armed troops garrisoned in the town, ready for action at a moment’s notice. One couldn’t make assumptions.

His men, in full camouflage, waited in absolute silence. He had divided them into three batalhões of ten men each: Red, Blue, and Green, with one man from each squad assigned to the feinting maneuver.

The seconds ticked by. And then he heard it: automatic gunfire, punctuated with the louder, deeper explosions of grenades. The diversion had begun.

He raised his arm in a gesture of readiness as he listened intently to the diversion. There was return fire, but not as much as he expected, and it sounded scattered and disorganized. These Nazis, with their militarism and alleged martial brilliance, appeared to be flat-out unprepared.