Amber, page 17
Maddock pointed the way toward shore. “There’s some good cover there, lots of plants. Close enough to the other side. Land us there, Bones. We stay out on open water any longer and they’re going to smoke us.”
Willis dug his oar in the water and turned them toward the water’s edge. Bones kept up on the cycle while Maddock pointed to a spot on shore with a dense covering of vegetation only a few feet from the water.
“Grab your packs, get ready to jump and run as soon as we hit shore.” Maddock eyed Leopov as he said it, but she already had her pack on, as did Bones. The turn had thrown off the Russians somewhat, but now they closed in again, bullets strafing the lake surface as they chopped up the water in neat rows to the right of the skiff.
As soon as they felt the resistance of the boat’s hull on the lake bottom as it nosed up onto the beach, they leapt from the craft, Bones letting the motorcycle fall over as he abandoned ship, still wearing the helmet. Leopov ducked into the foliage first, followed by Maddock, Professor and Willis. Bones dared to take one last look at the Russians tailing them right before he ducked into the greenery, only to be greeted with a bullet smacking into a tree branch inches from his left arm.
Then he, too, turned and disappeared into the forested shoreline.
Chapter 27
Maddock’s group moved with a quiet speed through the lush lakeside growth. They still heard sporadic gunfire behind them, but the SEALs knew they were random potshots taken more out of frustration than because they had locked onto a target. When it was clear that even those shots were moving in the opposite direction, the team paused for a much-needed breather, hunkering down beneath a clump of wet ferns.
While they rested and shared water from a canteen, Bones asked Professor for the journal so that he could take a look at the map again. Professor produced it and together they estimated their current position based on landmarks they’d seen while out on the boat.
Bones was lost in concentration, staring alternately down at the map and up through the landscape. At length a mischievous grin took over his features and he announced, “Be right back.” He stepped off the path into the dense plant growth. Professor and the others were too absorbed either in the map or in keeping watch for the Russians to give his actions much thought.
For the next few minutes they compared their visual surroundings to the outline of the map, speculating on a definitive position for the treasure. They were still debating whether the Russian dive site could in fact be over the ‘X’ when they heard movement in the foliage and then Bones came crashing back onto the path. He was panting but grinning ear to ear. Maddock asked him if he was okay.
Bones caught his breath with his hands on his knees for a moment and then stood up. “I found it.”
Willis appeared skeptical. “Found what, your common sense? Because running around through the woods while a bunch automatic weapon toting treasure hunters are looking for us is pretty damned crazy, Bones.”
But Bones still grinned ear to ear. “C’mon, I’ll show you.” Bones moved silently through the underbrush. The others made a small amount of noise as they followed him, but nothing a human would detect from any distance away. He led them roughly parallel to shore, neither gaining nor losing altitude, until they reached an area with even thicker vegetation.
Bones showed them the tiny pathway he’d found through the wall of greenery and they threaded their way through, brushing aside cobwebs and small armies of buzzing insects. On the other side they found the remains of a stone building, surrounded by trees on all sides.
“What is it?” Willis asked.
Bones pointed to a crumbling cross on the front of the building. “It’s a church. C’mon, let’s go inside.”
Bones led them to the doorway of the old building, a simple, one-room affair but with a high ceiling now riddled with gaps. Maddock and Professor brought up the rear, heads on swivels as they monitored the area for threats. Inside the church, what was once a stone floor was now covered in dirt, with a profusion of plant life growing up through the cracks. Apparently Bones already knew where he was going, because he walked without hesitation straight back through the old house of worship to the rear, left wall.
“Check it out.”
The others gathered around and they stared down to where Bones was pointing, at a stone tile into which was carved an eagle.
Professor’s face lighted with recognition. “Looks like our old friend, the Prussian Eagle again.”
Maddock kept one ear tuned to their conversation and the other on the Russian party, clearly audible from here. They had stayed in pursuit and now seemed to be homing in on the old church. In fact, Maddock could now make out individual Russian words, although he couldn’t understand them. He watched Leopov out of the corner of his eye, also content to let the others carry on the conversation about Bones’ find, but if she was hearing anything of significance from the Russians, she was keeping it to herself.
Bones gestured to the engraved symbol. “It’s strange to see this eagle in a church, right?”
Professor agreed. “It’s not a symbol associated with any major religion or faith.”
“Not only that,” Bones continued, “but during World War Two, Austria was part of Germany, right?”
Again Professor nodded. “It was under German control, yes, which was reversed when the war ended. But during the time the Amber Room went missing, Austria was definitely under Hitler’s thumb.”
Bones looked at the tile. “So why do we have a Prussian Eagle in what was basically Germany at the time? They had their own eagle, and it doesn’t look anything like this one.”
Willis knelt next to the tile. “Enough yapping about it already. Let’s see if it does anything.” He tried pressing on the eagle, but nothing happened. Bones looked around to see if the action had set off any booby traps—heavy objects about to fall on them, spears shooting out of the crumbling walls, perhaps spikes jutting up from the ground—but all was still.
Then Willis attempted to turn the tile within its setting, but that too had no effect. “Screw this.” He stood and got purchase on the edge of the tile with his fingers before starting to pull.
“I think I feel a little movement but that sucker’s wedged in there good. We need a pry bar, anybody got something?”
Bones shrugged off his pack and dug around in it. He came up with a large fixed blade knife. “This’ll have to do.”
Willis raised an eyebrow at the blade and took it by the proffered handle. He applied it to the tile and this time they heard a low scraping sound as it moved against the surrounding stone. After a little more effort Willis was able to pry the tile loose. He set it aside to reveal an opening to a space below. A set of iron handholds led down into darkness. The team circled around the portal, Maddock producing his flashlight to aim down inside it.
Meanwhile, Leopov picked up the tile cap and examined it, turning it over, scrutinizing all facets of it including the bottom and sides. She tapped portions of it here and there, scraped various surfaces on it with a fingernail. She was turning it over one more time when she heard someone exclaim how deep the opening was and she turned to look, causing her to drop the stone tile. It landed on the floor and did not break but produced a loud, percussive sound that reverberated throughout the church.
Maddock instantly shushed everyone and listened. The Russian voices grew louder.
Maddock looked to Leopov. “What are they saying?”
“They heard the noise and they’re coming to investigate. I’m sorry.”
Willis glared at her briefly and looked like he was about to verbalize a not-so-nice sentiment, when Maddock pre-empted him. “Down we go, c’mon, before they get here!”
Bones dropped down the rungs first, followed by Willis and Professor. Leopov looked like she wanted Maddock to go next, but he would have none of it. He wouldn’t give her the chance to possibly communicate with the other Russians, if in fact she was associated with them. How much of a fight she would make about it might also be a clue.
“Ladies first,” Maddock insisted.
“It’s okay, you can go. I’m right behind you.”
Maddock picked up the tile cap. “This thing’s pretty heavy. Pulling it back into place to cover our tracks won’t be that easy. I’ll handle it. Now come on, go!”
Leopov pursed her lips and, for a fraction of a second, she looked like she was about to argue. But then she spun and put her legs on the rungs and began climbing down to the others. Maddock heard actual footfalls of the Russians now, boots crunching on soil, leaves rustling and branches snapping.
He started down the rungs, pausing to pull the tile in place over his head. It was difficult to fit it snugly into the floor from his perch beneath the opening, but after a couple of tries he got it to fall into position by letting it drop straight down from a few inches, which did make a noise but not very loud. He heard footsteps entering the church just as the tile settled into place.
He descended into the underground space.
Chapter 28
“This is wild. Look at all this stuff! It’s like a museum down here.” Bones swept his flashlight around the space, a long corridor with evenly spaced alcoves, each one like a room with only three walls. As Maddock passed the first alcove, on his right, he saw that it was indeed filled with all sorts of German World War II relics. There were piles of uniforms, swastika armbands, huge stacks of boots, boxes piled high with medals. The team chattered with all of the new finds they discovered, but it troubled Maddock as a soldier to think that these items had once been worn in the service of a nation’s military, and that they had ended up here, obviously stockpiled in a secret, hidden location. Had they been grave-robbed?
“Oh my God. Look at this. You’ve got to see this!” Professor’s voice was a strange mixture of giddiness and disgust. Maddock was almost afraid to see what he had found but curiosity got the better of him. He left the alcove he was in, passed another to his left that was full of artillery and ammunition, shell cases and the like, and found Professor in the next alcove to the left.
Fittingly, he stood in the midst of what looked like a storehouse for a library, with stacks of dusty books piled high here and there, with other interesting odds and ends scattered about including a large, old-looking globe on an ornate, golden stand. Racks of what Maddock guessed to be old scrolls, written in Latin, lined one wall.
“I don’t believe it.” Professor mumbled, staring at the open page of a book. Maddock approached him and looked on. Wordlessly, Professor flipped to the cover, where Maddock read: Mein Kampf. Beneath the title, which Maddock knew to mean, My Struggle, was the author’s name: Adolf Hitler.
“Now look.” Professor flipped the cover open to the title page, where a two-word scrawl occupied the space below the title. “He signed it. This is an autographed copy of Mein Kampf!”
Maddock had conflicted feelings about such memorabilia, as he supposed many people did. He knew the book must be worth a substantial sum, but he himself would never feel comfortable profiting from such a dark piece of human history.
“Unless it has something to do with finding the Amber Room, we should leave it be.”
Professor looked up at him in a state of bewilderment. “Leave it? Do you know how much this thing is worth?”
Maddock shrugged. “Not enough, my friend. Not nearly enough. C’mon, forget that thing, let’s go.”
“Whoa....Whoa, man!” It was Willis’ turn to pique everyone’s curiosity. Maddock and Professor met up with him in a right-side alcove at the same time as Leopov and Bones filed in. Willis knelt in front of an open wooden crate, in a room filled with stacked crates.
Immediately Leopov read the thoughts of the others. “These crates are too small to contain the main Amber Room panels.” They looked to Willis again, who stared in fascination at a piece of paper in his hand. The crate he had opened was full of similar looking paperwork.
“Whatcha got?”
Maddock stepped up to him and he rose, pointing to a raised was seal. “Not sure, but it looks important, and whatever it is...” He pointed to the open crate and the rest of the boxes in the room. “...There are a lot of them.”
“Let me see.” Leopov took a look. “German...I’m not fluent, but I believe these are land deeds...” Her voice dropped off as she read on.
“What?” Willis looked up at her, but she seemed distraught, unable to continue. Professor took a look at the document.
“These are land deeds. Judging from the number of them, as well as some of the other stuff I saw in here, they were confiscated from Jews.” Everyone had a moment of silence as they contemplated this.
“They still worth anything?” Bones wanted to know.
Professor shrugged. “To the heirs of the people who owned them, sure. I would think that these could prove property ownership and therefore potentially cause major problems for the German government if all of these heirs pressed their claims at once.” Professor put the deeds back in the crate and sealed the lid.
The team moved on, fanning out and searching the different alcoves. Maddock made sure to keep a sharp yet surreptitious eye on Leopov lest she discover something she didn’t want the rest of the group to know about, and to see if she attempted communication somehow, although even if she did have a radio or other device, he doubted it would be able to get a signal into or out of this underground complex.
It wasn’t long before Professor’s voice rang out in the series of chambers. “Wow. Look at this machine!” The team found him in an alcove further along and gathered there. “I think it’s a computer.” Professor ran a hand over a metal chassis festooned with knobs and buttons occupying most of the alcove’s back wall.
Maddock nodded. “So this is one of those early computers that took up a whole room but today the same processing power fits into a desktop PC.”
Professor nodded. “Exactly. And look at this! IBM. Right here!” He wiped away some dust and sure enough, the logo of the well-known computer maker was visible engraved into the metal case.
“Wow.” Even Bones was suitably impressed. “I didn’t think IBM was around that long.”
Professor continued to examine the machine while he answered. “Oh yeah. Even for them, this is an old machine, though. This thing ran on punch cards...”
“And here they are!” Leopov had a crate opened from a stack in the corner. She leafed through a stack of manila cards, a series of neat holes punched in orderly arrays on each one of them.
“What did they use them for?” Willis asked. This was met with silence until Professor spoke in a shaky voice.
“Wow...I...I think they were used to keep track of...”
Leopov fanned out a group of punch cards in a hand and held them up. “It started out as a census tool for the German government. But as the war progressed, it evolved into a way to identify where people of certain races were in various regions, and some say, to keep track of where Hitler’s regime was sending all the Jewish prisoners--how many open spaces they had remaining at each camp...basically a human inventory tracking system for the Nazi war machine. Technologically speaking it was highly advanced for its time.”
Maddock appeared incredulous. “And IBM—the same company that gave us the personal computer in the early 1980s—did this?”
Leopov nodded. “They did. They don’t explicitly deny it, either, but of course they keep the details under tight wraps.”
Bones had lost interest in the computer equipment and wandered off, but now called the group to the next alcove over. “We’re getting warmer.”
The team left the punch cards behind and joined Bones, who had pried the lid off a crate and was holding a thick gold bar in each hand. “Jackpot!”
Maddock looked around the space, the floor of which was covered in crates and trunks, some stacked two or three high. “You think...?”
They moved quickly to open a few more crates. Every one they opened contained some kind of precious metal; not all were gold bars, but some held coins, medallions, jewelry. Besides gold there was platinum and precious stones as well. The accumulation of wealth was dizzying. Maddock opened yet another crate brimming with gold bullion and then dropped the lid back on it. “There’s fabulous treasure in here, probably the lost Nazi gold thought to be in the lake all these years, but it’s not the Amber Room. We need to move on.”
Just as Bones started to protest, they heard the trammel of footsteps echoing farther down the passage, toward the church.
Maddock spun and made for the main passage, well aware that the alcove was a dead end, probably literally, were they to be cornered in here. “Move!”
They poured into the passageway and continued away from the church. They entered a long stretch where there were no more alcoves on either side, only a straightaway. As they followed it at a run, the first gunshots shattered the underground quiet.
Chapter 29
“The Russians from the lake must have heard us in the church and followed us down here.” Bones didn’t stop running as he panted the words.
“Not Russian.” Leopov was a step or two behind Bones. “They’re speaking German!”
They kept on until they saw muzzle flashes ahead of them. Realizing they were trapped, with gunfire on either side of them, they ducked into the first alcove to appear since they left the one with the gold.
Chips of stone peppered their upper bodies as they made the turn. Even once inside the alcove, the barrage of arms fire continued from both ends of the corridor.
Maddock, from his position low against the wall, said, “They must be shooting at each other.” They heard a howl of pain emanating from their left, then a string of what all of them except Leopov could only assume was foul language.
“”That’s Russian, coming from that side,” Leopov said, pointing to the left end of the corridor.
“Russians and Germans battling each other?” Willis looked confused.
