The Doomsday Testament (27 page)

They were coming.

IF ANYTHING, GUSTAV’S
astonishment when he reached the tunnel was greater than Jamie’s. But where it had inspired fear in his quarry, the German only felt a sense of wonder and pride at the incredible feat of engineering his forefathers had created and kept secret for so many years. There had never been any doubt he would capture the fugitives, but this made it simpler and more convenient. No one would hear them screaming from beneath thirty feet of concrete.

In the yellow beam of his torch two distinct sets of footprints disappeared into the darkness. It was almost laughable. He felt like a fisherman reeling in his line. Gustav had watched through binoculars as they scurried like trapped ants along the base of the cliff seeking a non-existent escape route. He’d experienced a few moments of concern when they disappeared into the gully, but when he had reported the problem to Frederick it was almost as if the other man had been
expecting
the news. Frederick had issued very specific instructions and a warning. In the dying weeks of the war and for unexplained reasons, the Oder facility had been red-flagged by Himmler himself. There could be any number of reasons for that, but one thing was clear. Some secrets must stay secrets. For ever.

Sarah Grant and Jamie Saintclair would not leave the bunker alive.

The threatening silence was always with them. They moved quickly, as if, by their swiftness, they could somehow leave it behind along with whoever had followed them into the complex. But in the vast labyrinth of the tunnels the silence always prevailed. Jamie led the way, with the Raphael tucked under his left arm and the torch in his right hand. As they ran through the echoing man-made underworld he was conscious of the trail they left behind them, but what option did they have? Any attempt to disguise their footprints would leave just as big a signpost and would waste time. Their only hope was speed and the chance that somewhere in the maze was another exit.

They approached a massive steel door which looked as if it was sitting slightly ajar. It was only when they got closer that Jamie saw it was hanging from its hinges. He raced through, into the heart of Walter Brohm’s secret world.

Behind the door lay a room the size of a football pitch that contained the biggest junkyard Jamie had ever seen. If it reminded him of anything, it was the wreckage of
the
Twin Towers on the morning of 12 September 2001. At every point of their vision, twisting, rusted metal created huge modernist sculptures: pyramids of engines, pumps and centrifuges, corkscrewed tubes and broken-toothed cogwheels, mounds of nameless machinery in every shape and size; ovens, gas tanks and even an entire tractor hanging like festive decorations. When they shone the torches over the roof and walls they could see the great white scars where the mass of steel and iron had been hurled by the force of an explosion powerful enough to crack the feet-thick reinforced concrete and expose the steel cables within. For a moment, they stood in silent awe taking in the immensity of it. The power required to create such a cataclysm. The incredible squandering of energy, effort and talent.

Sarah made to set off again, but Jamie pulled her back.

This place is like a minefield.’ His voice was a whisper. ‘We’ve no idea what traps may have been set. There are wires everywhere. Just walking through this lot would be dangerous enough. One foot in the wrong place and you’ll start an avalanche. If we run . . .’

‘But . . .’

‘I know,’ he insisted. ‘If we slow down, they’ll catch us. We have to find a way to delay them.’

He studied their footprints again, Sarah’s so much smaller than his own. ‘Get behind me.’ He took three steps forward. ‘Now, as light-footed as you can, walk in my footsteps.’ She did as she was told and they scrutinized the result as if their lives depended on it. Two lines of tracks had merged into one.

‘Not bad, but they aren’t going to buy that I upped and disappeared into thin air, are they?’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But see how your tracks stop by the base of that big heap of debris with what looks like a boiler at the top? Well, the first thing they’re going to suspect is that I’ve sent you up there to cover me while I escape.’

‘You wouldn’t do that,’ she pointed out.

‘No, but the cold-blooded bastard who is leading these people would. It won’t delay them for long, but it might give us a chance. What we really need is to find some way to hurt them. Maybe take out one or two of them altogether.’

She darted a glance towards the doorway. ‘Well, you’d better be quick.’

He handed her the Raphael. ‘This is one of the darker arts I learned while I was in the OTC at Cambridge.’ He pulled something circular from the inside pocket of his jacket and held it up for her to see. ‘Fishing nylon. Fifty yards of thirty-pound breaking strain, but so thin you can’t see it. You can use it to fish, but it also comes in handy for stitching wounds, putting up a makeshift shelter and for certain rather devious manoeuvres involving a hand grenade.’ She declined to point out that they didn’t have a hand grenade, but he probably wouldn’t have heard her. As he talked he searched the closest heap of metal until he found what he was looking for. First, he tied the spider-web-thin strand of nylon from the leg of what had once been a workbench to a twisted piece of machinery about the size of a football.

‘Give me your rope.’

Working quickly, he knotted one end of the rope through a gap in the metal part and when he was done he placed it gently so that a single twitch of the nylon would make it fall.

‘Now comes the difficult bit.’

Sarah gasped as she saw what he planned.

‘You can’t. It will bring the whole lot down. Leave it, we don’t have time.’

He ignored her and gingerly began climbing. After the first few feet he turned to look down at her. ‘Make your way to the centre room on the far side, but stick to the edges of the aisles and try to keep your feet of the floor. I’ll join you if I can.’

The piece he’d identified was about halfway up, maybe fifteen feet from the floor. Hardly daring to breathe, he slowly made his way towards it, knowing that every second was bringing their pursuers closer, but that to rush was to invite disaster. As he went, he pushed the slack of the rope into any gaps in the metal spoil, so it was close to invisible. The motor part was about twice the size of the smaller piece of machinery attached to the fishing nylon and it formed the key to a finely balanced heap, which in turn carried the weight of a massive engine of some kind. With trembling hands he laced the rope around it. Was it unstable enough? He reached out to make sure, but he knew that if he moved it even an inch it could bring the whole mountain of metal down and him with it. Reluctantly, he retreated, taking even more care where he put his feet.

He’d just reached the floor when she screamed, a scream so drenched in terror that it turned his heart to ice.

‘Sarah!’

He started to run through the twisted heaps of metal.

THE PONY-TAILED MAN
stared from the enormous picture window of his suite in the corporation’s Manhattan headquarters and considered his next move. Normally he barely noticed the dramatic New York skyline, but today it inspired and moved him. The fact that he was the head of the Vril Society did not make him any less of an American. This country had lost its way, thanks to failed politicians who did not understand the new reality. In the decades since the Second World War, the United States had sought to extend its global influence by military and economic means, but in almost every instance it had failed. Korea had been the last just war, and the West had been fought to a stalemate, ground down by the sheer mass of its enemies. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were largely pointless conflicts, as he saw it, with little profit to be had either politically or diplomatically. The 9/11 attacks had shown how a great power could be rendered militarily impotent. In the wake of the Twin Towers, America had lashed out
like
a chained bear at her tormentors; the bear had the power to crush its attackers, but the chains of misguided liberalism denied her the chance to use that power to its full extent.

And now the world was moving towards a new phase, but they were still too blind to see it. Energy was the key. It had been the key since the first turn of a turbine during the Industrial Revolution way back in the eighteenth century. The Russians knew that, and Europe would soon be on its knees begging for a whiff of the natural gas reserves the Kremlin controlled. But the Russians would only hold the cards in the short term. He had a far broader vision. A true world leader who combined the best of German and American blood would create peace and prosperity. No government on earth would be able to ignore him when he could send them back to the Dark Ages with the flick of a switch.

But he couldn’t delude himself. He didn’t just need the Sun Stone to make his vision a reality. He needed it to survive. His analysts predicted that the global banking crisis was much worse than anyone, even the banks themselves, realized. The group of companies he had formed was hopelessly exposed. If one of them went under the effect would be like the bottom brick being removed from a wooden tower. The entire entity would collapse, bringing all the other nearby towers down with it. The result would be catastrophic.

Frederick said his men would soon have Saintclair and the girl, and with them the journal. But Frederick could not be allowed to lay his hands on the Sun Stone.
Frederick
was a very dangerous man: the true soul of the Vril, even if he did not yet know it. A fanatic who would take the stone and use it in some pointless mumbo-jumbo ritual at Wewelsburg.

The true power of the Sun Stone lay in its capacity to change the future, not alter the past.

In time, Frederick would have to be taken care of, but Frederick was not the only obstacle in his path. Somewhere out there other forces were at work. Sinister unseen forces who exhibited the same ruthlessness he was capable of himself. The Chinese certainly, though how much they knew of the Sun Stone’s true power he wasn’t sure. And who had killed their two agents? It was even possible some shadowy organization within his own government had become involved. If that were the case he might be forced to reconsider his long-term strategy. He had always intended to make a gift to his country of the military by-products generated by Brohm’s breakthrough. Now he could be forced to play that particular card a little earlier than he’d intended. Soldiers were such simple souls, give them a sniff of a new wonder weapon that would make a bigger bang than anything yet created and they would sit up and beg. But for the moment all that was of secondary importance.

He turned back to the desk, where the grinning silver skull from the casket returned his stare. Secret papers of any kind are a currency, even if they deal with events long past. Surprisingly often they produce the small seedlings from which large profits grow.
One
of the businesses that formed his many-tentacled corporation was that of producing newspapers. True, as an industry it was in danger of being steamrollered by the emerging technologies and was not the high-profit vehicle it had once been. Still, he enjoyed the prestige that ownership brought with it and the leverage his reporters gave him over small-minded individuals in government and the professions. From the start he had been amused by how artfully dishonest journalism could be; utterly unscrupulous, like espionage, but more cynical and with a little less pointless sacrifice. Through his publications he had created a network of informants among low-paid government archivists across Europe and the United States, retained to cherry-pick their files for papers that might be of interest. These men and women believed they were working for his newspapers and were grateful to accept a relative pittance for the fruits of their researches. Certain categories of papers, including those of curiosity value or which provided the possibility of exploitation, automatically made their way to his desk.

The documents from the records clerk in Cologne were only forwarded to him because of his well-known interest in technology, but he could still remember the dry feeling in his throat as he had read them for the first time. They dated from 1943 and included requisition orders for certain materials, tools and equipment that seemed to point to only one thing – and a name.

That was when he had launched the resources of the Vril Society on this hunt to discover Walter Brohm’s
whereabouts
and the location of his research materials. The first hint of progress had come with an investigation into Brohm’s background and the revelation that he had been a member of the 1937 Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet. Most of the official papers had been destroyed, but enough evidence remained to reconstruct the route of the expedition and satellite images of the Changthang crater confirmed enough of what the Brohm papers hinted at to set his heart racing. It had taken six years to track down the casket and another three before he had the confidence to give the Menshikov operation the green light. In the meantime, his Vril contacts in the State department and the Bundestag were making efforts to discover Walter Brohm’s fate. The German authorities had traced a Red Cross document confirming Brohm’s incarceration in a prisoner-of-war camp near Leipzig, where he had been placed in protective custody. His rank was given as private and, even more curiously, the paper had later been stamped ‘Unconfirmed’. There was no further evidence of Brohm’s existence in the camp system. Much later, the State department official found Brohm’s name in a list of potential prisoners who might be suitable for what would become Operation Paperclip, a secret OSS programme to recruit Nazi scientists and exfiltrate them to work for the American government. The next big breakthrough had come when some nuisance of a computer hacker had leaked dozens of archived Pentagon files on the internet, including a document marked ‘Highly Restricted’ which named Jedburgh teams Dietrich and Edgar. The military
record
showed that Team Edgar had been wiped out in an ambush in the Bavarian Alps on 8 May 1945, the day the war ended. On further investigation, it was found that two survivors from Team Dietrich, Captain Matthew Sinclair and Lieutenant Stanislaus Kozlowski, had been subsequently awarded the Military Cross for their actions on that date. Walter Brohm had never been heard of again.